As Rishi Sunak leaves the stage he will know – and has long accepted – he’ll be forever seen as the man that led the Conservatives to one of the most devastating election defeats in their history.
For others he’ll be the man who stabbed Boris Johnson in the back. The man who was a Conservative in name only. The man who couldn’t stop the boats. The man fined for a party that shouldn’t have happened.
It’s a mark of him as a person he’s always shouldered the blame for the election defeat and not engaged in battling the rest. He has not blamed others – but others share the blame. Indeed, his conduct and his performances, when he’s appeared since, always induces me to bastardise Shakespeare:
“Nothing so became his time as Prime Minister as his leaving of it.”
At this year’s Conference, expecting a venting of frustration from ordinary members, I was surprised by the reception he was given for the Sunday appearance he made. The full crowd weren’t angry, they didn’t listen in respectful silence, they cheered him. It was genuine.
Again, he acknowledged government failings, his mistakes, but also listed the successes of 14 years of Conservative government. One myth is that he didn’t have any. Don’t believe the Labour hype. They believed their own, and so far, it’s bitten them back.
I spoke to many of the crowd and the theme was much the same; that Rishi Sunak is a decent man, who did his best, owns his mistakes and worked hard. It wasn’t enough. It led to an awful defeat, but he simply did not deserve to take all the blame.
If people had expected to see more of him during the last four months, he has, I’m told, been determined not to overshadow or impose himself in the long leadership contest that ends tomorrow. He did not vote in it and wanted it to take place without him stage-right – or left depending on your perceptions of him.
As we saw on Wednesday, he has not shied from his dispatch box encounters with a Prime Minister who can’t help referring to him as “The Prime Minister”.
At this week’s PMQs the good-natured banter showed two things: for all their many exchanges, Sir Keir Starmer acknowledged that Rishi Sunak is a decent man. It’s a widespread view in Parliament. The camaraderie on display however, also showed, contrary to popular belief, that Sunak has some political guile about him. Something his critics always say he lacks.
Perhaps lulled by the earlier soft ball exchange, the Labour front bench were not expecting the post Budget evisceration they received from a man with nothing to lose and something to prove. They’d not been straight with the public and someone needed to say it. No better person than Rishi Sunak in furious flow.
Whilst I support Rachel Reeves telling the Commons that there’s something important about young women seeing the first woman Chancellor deliver a Budget, the glass ceiling on her side still exists. The Conservatives have given Britain three female Prime Ministers and with Sunak the first non-white Prime Minister. It’s testament to the party that that didn’t seem worth overplaying, but it did matter.
Budget responses are often something of a side show, but Sunak, who had been Chief Secretary to the Treasury and Chancellor himself, launched a blistering attack on his successors opposite. He told them in no uncertain terms what a shabby deception they had played on the electorate over their gigantic tax plans, and by implication reminded the electorate – I told you so.
As political speeches go, it was a bravura finale.
The problem is, and he knows this, that by the time he called the election, the voters, the media, and indeed many Tory MPs just weren’t in the mood to listen to the Conservative party, or him.
The calculation was that after several successes such as the Windsor Framework, defence spending to 2.5%, rock solid support for Ukraine, cutting the benefits bill, the polls just refused to shift. Maybe winning in 2024 might have been beyond the party before he entered Downing Street, but we’ll never know.
Perhaps there was an argument for just getting on with it, but I don’t meet many Conservatives that think it was the right decision. But none of us were in the room when the discussions took place. There was a calculation, we can’t know if it would have been better right now, in November.
Some of the widespread criticisms of Rishi Sunak are lazy.
“He wasn’t really a Conservative, and had no political nous” is the most common.
It’s both an irony, and ultimately unsustainable, that he was judged by many Conservatives as the most left-wing PM they ever had, and by other parties as leading the most right-wing administration they had ever seen.
Sunak is at heart a Conservative and if, under him, taxes went up and the state grew bigger, and intervened in people’s lives, it is because he was part of tackling the first global pandemic in 70 years, and immediately after that, the economic shock waves of a land war in Europe.
It is frustrating that having advanced the furlough scheme he didn’t simultaneously and more vigorously pitch roll that it would have to be paid for. It is a miss I think he paid for. However, for all Labour’s attacks on the mini-budget, Rishi Sunak always said it’s not what he’d have done, and he got inflation down by more than he said he would.
Another pot shot is that he cannot understand what ordinary people think because he and his wife are rich. It’s an obvious political attack but it doesn’t really fit either of them, or their behaviour, whatever their wealth.
As Chief Secretary to the Treasury he was known for taking a real interest in the people he worked with, what they cared about and wanted, Conservative or not. He likes talking to people and hearing about them, not talking about himself. I started to hear his name about this time, when my then boss – no Conservative – had a meeting with him and came back impressed.
“Small man, big heart” one of his staff once told me.
When he became Chancellor, he made the time to have coffee with a junior official in his previous private office, to discuss their future and if he could help. It’s a pattern those who’ve worked with him recognise even after he left Downing Street.
Craig, now Lord McKinley, spoke movingly in the Commons of how the then Prime Minister had visited him several times in hospital, but that very few people knew about it. His wife opened Downing Street to school children every Friday for most of their time in the building and continues the voluntary work she took on even now that she isn’t there.
People see what they want to see and disregard the rest.
True, they saw boats he tried to stop, and didn’t. They also forget the measures put in this time last year that are reducing net migration by hundreds of thousands. Labour haven’t scrapped them, yet, but I bet they take the credit.
There is one criticism levelled at him that I agree with. For a man accused of taking too many helicopter rides, he struggled to helicopter out of the minutiae of government. Too often he delved into the weeds, rather than surveying things from above.
Being Prime Minister is not a role where you can alone solve every knotty problem, and woe betide those that try. Perhaps out of habit from his role as Chancellor – a problem that afflicted Gordon Brown – he habitually got into the detail, but thereby gave the impression he was more of a spreadsheet manager than a visionary leader.
I’m aware there will be people in the party, and the comments below, that will disregard any defence of the man and go back to where I started; the leader who took the Tories to a terrible defeat.
However, ex-leaders should get a fair analysis. Good and bad. He’d accept both. Hopefully now he’s leaving the stage he’ll be able to explain more of this himself.
I suspect that, unlike some of his predecessors, history will be kinder to his reputation than many currently are.
He deserves that much.