Rishi Sunak faces a tough challenge as Prime Minister (Stefan Rousseau/PA)
(Picture: PA Wire)It is hard to understand how far Britain’s reputation has fallen if you live in England. The six years and four different leaders the country has cycled through since it voted to leave the European Union have not just damaged the UK’s reputation with our nearest neighbours. They have soured Britain’s reputation in the US: the butt of constant jokes on American Twitter for its weak pound and prime ministers. Downing Street has made itself synonymous with incompetence worldwide.
But this is not the only thing sapping soft power. Britain’s past is also catching up with it. Internationally, from American universities to Caribbean newspapers and Indian television, there is a growing reckoning with slavery and imperialism. The explosion of criticism both online and in the op-ed pages of the New York Times around the Queen’s funeral is just one concentrated outburst of something much bigger. Power is shifting in the US out of the hands of a purely white elite — and internationally towards Asia. The British establishment’s heirs of empire may have forgotten it. The victims’ children, rising internationally, certainly haven’t.
Whatever people may have thought of them in the “Red Wall” or at Tory leadership hustings, Boris Johnson, who mumbled colonial Kipling verse on camera in a pagoda in Myanmar, or Liz Truss, who in her ignorance was tricked by the Russian foreign minister into denouncing Moscow’s claim to its own provinces, both did no favours for Britain’s rundown reputation: their failings confirmed the worst stereotypes of a shrivelled empire either run by fools or those with a whiff of racism about them.
The Kremlin realises all this: which is why Vladimir Putin, in his speeches, has been seeking to portray the Western reaction to his invasion of Ukraine as a continuum of colonialism in Africa and Asia and the Chinese opium wars. Russian propaganda since the start of the war has proven ineffective in Europe but highly successful in China, India and South Africa, where these messages obviously resonate. This strengthens public hostility to co-operating with Western sanctions on Russia.
The single photo that shot around the world of King Charles III, the grandson of the last colonial Emperor of India, shaking the hands of his new prime minister, Rishi Sunak, the grandson of colonial subjects of that same Raj, who would not have been allowed to use the same toilets as whites in the great imperial bases, let alone set foot in the white-only clubs of that era, is an image of enormous power. Britain can only rise above its worsening reputation by showing it is not the caricature in Putin’s speeches or The New York Times, but what it really is: one of the most successful multicultural societies in the world. More so than the US.
Sunak now has a chance to restore Britain’s reputation. And to some extent this has already begun. The fact that Joe Biden chose to speak of him at the White House Diwali Party — even if he problematically forgot his actual name — at a gathering featuring many of the world’s most powerful CEOs ends a period where no good word would be said about a British prime minister at such an occasion.
The fact that the French finance minister Bruno Lemaire pointedly said Sunak was a “friend” on Twitter after years of French ministers running down the UK online is a sign of things to come. As Benjamin Haddad, one of France’s most influential MPs on foreign policy, put it to me: “Many in the French political and defence establishment see Sunak’s arrival, a respected figure, as an opportunity to relaunch France-UK ties after years of post-Brexit tension.” There is also tentative optimism in Brussels.
“Competent” was the word that came up again and again when I asked senior American officials to share their views with me on Sunak. The exact opposite of the words they used to describe Johnson or Truss.
This matters because reputations — is your country or leader competent? — or moods — is your country seen as an avatar of a hopeful future or stuck in the past? — matter in foreign policy. They shape the relative weights of European leaders on the world stage and with it the influence they can wield.
Mocked by French and American Presidents under Johnson and Truss, it is undeniable that the role of being the King’s first minister has shrunk internationally.
Sunak has a historic chance to restore much of that damage. He should lean in: it may even pay dividends for him domestically.
