Rishi Sunak was a coward

Rishi Sunak should be one of Britain’s most remarkable Prime Ministers. He came into office at a time of immense change: the world was emerging from an unprecedented economic lockdown; Britain had to find a new place for itself in the world order after leaving the European Union; Russia’s invasion of Ukraine shattered long-held illusions about European security; and artificial intelligence made its first breakthroughs into public consciousness, promising one of humanity’s greatest technological breakthroughs and threatening to make millions of people’s labour obsolete.

On paper, Sunak seemed like the perfect candidate to meet this moment. His biography had every marker of a man with genuine elite talent and unquestionable intellect: head boy at the prestigious Winchester College, followed by a first from Oxford University, a Fulbright Scholarship at Stanford, then a successful career in the private sector that included stints at Goldman Sachs, various hedge funds including in California, and rising up to become a director in his early thirties, before entering Parliament as a fresh-faced thirty-four year old.

After the chaos of Boris Johnson — a man who used his own considerable intellect to play the buffoon in his vain and ever-present quest to be liked — and then whatever Liz Truss was, Sunak was exactly what the country needed: the perfect antidote to Tory ineptitude, who could answer the public’s calls to have a leader who was diligent, hard working, proven in fields beyond politics, and attuned to the problems the country faced. The greatest critique that Sunak then faced was that his elite trajectory and high-flying personal success made him out of touch with the realities of people more ordinary than him.

And yet, he was a total failure. Only the most attentive of political nerds would be able to recall anything of note he actually achieved as prime minister, despite occupying the office during such a consequential period of history. Perhaps it was too great of an ask for Sunak to occupy the role of a visionary leader, capable of ushering in a new political order, but at the very least he should have been able to fulfil the role of able technocrat, steadying the country’s course and resolving its most glaring problems. This was the role he initially cast himself in soon after he became prime minister, announcing his five pledges at the start of 2023 that he wanted his premiership to be judged by.

Sunak’s promises to the public were to halve inflation in 2023, grow the economy, get public debt falling, cut NHS waiting lists, and stop the boats. Gone was the populist bluster; here were a realistic set of goals a capable man like Sunak should have been able to achieve, unglamorously but importantly improving the state of the country. And yet Sunak failed to deliver even on these humble goals, except for halving inflation (something largely out of the prime minister’s control). The economy did not grow, NHS waiting lists increased, as did public debt, and the small boats are still arriving to this day.

His consistent tendency towards cowardice means he ducked all the difficult decisions

So how could this be? How could a man as manifestly intelligent as Sunak fail so comprehensively? His musings as a columnist in the Sunday Times since being booted out of office by the electorate on their first opportunity to do so give us a good idea. Sunak, in short, was a coward, and his consistent tendency towards cowardice means he ducked all the difficult decisions he recognised had to be made in order to avoid conflict or backlash.

At times, he has openly admitted to this himself. Writing about the damaging effects of constant minimum wage increases and their contribution to Britain’s youth unemployment rate being the highest in over a decade and above the EU average, Sunak recounts being aware of the issue as chancellor. “I should admit I did not stop this ratchet” he confesses, explaining that he had asked the country’s business groups to take up this fight, but after they chose to stay out of it, he “decided that for a multimillionaire chancellor to overrule the Low Pay Commission without any covering fire wasn’t politically sensible — and so let that pay carry on rising”. So he continued to implement a policy he knew was damaging the country, and only now in his new role as a backbencher has he started to regret his cowardice, writing: “I now wish I’d been braver and acted anyway”. 

This week, Sunak gave us an insight into why the Rwanda plan he staked so much of his reputation on completely failed, and once again his cowardice is the dominant theme. He recognises the necessity of leaving the European Convention on Human Rights to stop the boats, but tells us “attempting to leave the European convention on human rights with only two years left in the parliament and with no mandate to do so would have been a recipe for constitutional chaos”. In his defence, Sunak claims that “a fractious parliamentary party, a sceptical House of Lords and limited diplomatic capital” made it all too difficult. “But with a mandate, a majority and a five-year term, it would be very different, and worth doing” he adds.

Yet if he feels like an electoral mandate is a prerequisite for even trying to solve this issue, why was a commitment to leaving the ECHR absent from his general election campaign? Apparently, Sunak “had done extensive work on quitting the convention” behind the scenes and wanted to make it a pillar of his election campaign. However, when Nigel Farage entered the race, he dodged this too, worrying how it would look and choosing to campaign on the safer grounds of tax and the economy, not that it delivered great electoral dividends anyway. 

Indeed Sunak seems happier for having lost the election, for it now allows him the freedom to explain his great plans for reforming the British state without the responsibility of actually following through on them. He had already written about his regrets in rushing into claiming he would “stop the boats” since he knew, even before becoming prime minister, that politicians had become unsustainably constrained by legal conventions and the courts when dealing with all kinds of issues, from illegal migration to the planning system. “Politicians must take the blame for having put these constraints into law” Sunak argues, seemingly forgetting to add that politicians, especially those who held the highest office in the land, must also take the blame for not doing away with those constraints when they had the chance. He ended that column by calling for a return to the pre-1998 standard for judicial review, before lamenting that the current prime minister (then Keir Starmer) was unlikely to do this due to his “temperament”. 

In this, of course, Sunak was right: Starmer did not have the temperament to make big, radical decisions in office that the moment called for, much like Sunak before him, so it is of little surprise that he too barely lasted two years in Downing Street. But at least Starmer can boast of having won an election and rejuvenated his party. What can Sunak say? That he used his great intellect to come up with great plans, none of which saw the light of day? Maybe what will make Sunak’s tenure remarkable is its power as a cautionary tale, a warning against the impotence that flows from cowardice, and of the folly of thinking that there will ever come the perfect time to make the difficult decisions. Most likely, though, Sunak will mostly be forgotten — an inexplicable minnow thrust to the highest office in a time that demanded political giants, wasting vital years that could and should have been used to start arresting this country’s decline.