The “stop the boats” slogan was “too stark”, Rishi Sunak has said, reflecting on his time in office, adding that he even regrets ever using the phrase because it was “too binary”.
The former prime minister, who led the Conservative party to one of its worst election defeats in history, described it as one of the main lessons he had learned from his time in Downing Street.
While he still believes it was right to prioritise reducing the number of people crossing the Channel, calling illegal migration “fundamentally not fair”, he said the messaging “wasn’t quite right”.
Speaking on the BBC’s Political Thinking podcast, Sunak said he “probably should have put those priorities, which I still believe were the right priorities, in a better context for exactly how challenging it was”.
He added: “Our generosity is limitless, and our compassion is limitless, but our resources are not. It’s just fundamentally unfair, and fairness is central to our national character, and when people see this happening, I think it undermines that sense of fairness on which our society, our way of life, is based on.”
In the wide-ranging interview, Sunak, who became the first British Asian and Hindu prime minister, described the recent debate around national identity as “slightly ridiculous”.
The former Spectator editor Fraser Nelson insisted that Sunak “is absolutely English, he was born and bred here”, to which Konstantin Kisin, who co-presents a podcast, responded: “He’s a brown Hindu; how is he English?”
Sunak told the BBC: “Of course I’m English. I found the whole thing slightly ridiculous.”
Similarly, the shadow foreign secretary, Priti Patel, told Sky News earlier in the week: “I do consider myself English, and I’m an Essex MP, so I do frequently say The Only Way is Essex. I do, of course I do.”
Sunak went on to reject claims that calling an early general election was a snap decision. “I thought about it hard, and I had been thinking about it for quite a while, what the right thing to do was,” he said.
“When I reflect back on it, I know the reasons why I did it, I thought hard about it, and what I have not ever heard, really, in a compelling fashion, is what would have dramatically improved three months later.
“I think getting the Rwanda scheme up and running was going to be hard, and I think it would have required a mandate.
“Similarly, tax and spend, we’ve been having these conversations, I wanted to do quite radical things, whether on welfare spending or others, and I think those would have been hard to do without a mandate.”
He said he would back his successor Kemi Badenoch if she wanted to leave the European convention on human rights and that he would cut welfare spending to pay for an increase in the defence budget.
“I think, quite frankly, that is the most important thing for the country to do next, so that we can fund defence adequately,” he said.
Having left Downing Street after the election defeat in July 2024, Sunak said he was “excited” about what happens next. “I’m 44, I’ve got years ahead of me, and I don’t want being prime minister to be the only thing that defines me professionally. I think I’ve got plenty more to contribute.”
