To kick off the Conservative conference, Laura Kuenssberg gave Rishi Sunak a first look, on air, at a word cloud of responses from the public to the question: “What does Rishi Sunak stand for?” If you were building a reputation as a supervillain, the words looked great, but what about a prime minister? Unprecedented? Disastrous? “The Rich”, “Rich People”, “Rich” and “People” were four separate categories, by far the most ubiquitous; only “Money” and “Himself” came close. A few people knew he was a Conservative. There was an honourable mention of “wealth”, which is a little more courteous than “rich”, in so far as it’s not something you are, it’s something you have. Either way, one thing has cut through about the prime minister: he is really rich.
It did come up, when he first took office a year ago, that his immense riches might pose a problem for him, just in the day-to-day stuff. Traditionally, people like their politicians to know the price of milk and how to pour a pint. This was always quite an easy fix for our esteemed public servants, who could learn these details ahead of a leadership bid.
By the time Sunak came into office, the price of milk was going up so fast that nobody knew how much it was from one week to the next, and he could have got a pass. Besides, his cheerleaders came in fast, making strident arguments about the politics of envy. You could no more help being wealthy than you could help being a Catholic; it was bigoted, actually, to mind that your prime minister was wealthier than King Charles. The argument was unhinged, but that didn’t mean it couldn’t work: we were living through a political era in which it was sexist to mind that Liz Truss had crashed the economy, and racist to query Priti Patel’s Rwanda policy for refugees. These are fun, topsy-turvy times, when no known call for equality and decency can’t be dipped in moon juice and fired back at you.
But Sunak didn’t do himself any favours. When it transpired last year that he had to be taught how to use contactless card payments, even people outside the Westminster bubble started thinking, “Just how rich is this guy? Does he have a 24-hour valet? Or does he simply never have to pay for anything? Do all transactions take place several rungs beneath his imperial perch?” It didn’t help, either, when his local electricity grid had to be boosted to serve his swimming pool, gym and tennis courts. The poor (outlandishly rich) guy couldn’t win: even when he said he was paying for the grid upgrade himself, that just raised more questions, such as, “Who heats their tennis courts?”; “I wonder how much a grid upgrade is – more or less than a car made of diamonds?”; “Wouldn’t it be great if the rest of us could afford energy?”; “Why can’t you use your local pool? Oh, right, because it can’t afford to stay open, fair play.”
By the time it came out in June that Sunak had donated £2.4m for a computing lab at the elite Claremont McKenna college in California, following £100,000 to the elite Winchester boarding school he attended, while the PTA at his local primary school were struggling to raise more than a third of their £15,000 target for new computers, he must surely have been hoping we would file that under: “Stuff we already know: he’s rich, OK? He is not going to get any less rich. That’s not how this stuff works.”
The good news for Sunak is that the nation did precisely that. We sorted all this information into one giant category called “rich people”, so that the finer distinctions of his choices were muffled. What even is it when you focus your philanthropy on other rich people and ignore hardship on your doorstep? Clueless? Selfish? Meh. It’s just “things rich people do”. Just about his only viable electoral messaging, now, would be: “I must care deeply about the nation; why else would I put myself through this, when I am so incredibly rich?” But this will probably be filed under: “Meh. That’s just a thing rich people say.”
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
