Sunak, the failure

With the markets in freefall and a parliamentary party in open rebellion, Truss became a political joke: the summer holiday prime minister outlasted by a lettuce. With a self-inflicted financial crisis to urgently fix, and trust in the Conservative membership completely destroyed, Tory MPs stitched up a second leadership contest to hand the crown to Rishi Sunak, unopposed.

That made Rishi Sunak the prime minister who had lost to a woman who had lost to a lettuce. He had no personal mandate of his own other than being the candidate of convenience at a desperate time for his party. He had not been selected by his party or by the electorate. And he had inherited an absolute mess.

Almost every single move Sunak has made since that point has been an effort to redeem his premiership from those calamitous origins – to try to make sure that he was not the same kind of punchline as his predecessor, nor some forgettable also-ran prime minister in the dying days of an exhausted government.

That doomed search for a legacy has been the obvious motivator underlying everything else Rishi Sunak has done, which has otherwise lacked any kind of consistency or motivating agenda. 

Sunak sought on the one hand to be the PM who “saved” the nation’s economy, tackling inflation and returning the country to growth – but in practice his desire to also avoid electoral disaster prompted him to cut national insurance even as inflation was still too high, which directly fought against the Bank of England’s rate rises to bring it down.

Other legacies would have been more contentious: Rishi Sunak did not just commit himself to the Rwanda flights policy he inherited from Boris Johnson, but brought huge extra political attention to bear on it, when he could have almost as easily dropped it as a doomed gimmick. Perhaps he could be the prime minister who got the Rwanda flights going? But this was not to be.

Perhaps the most blatant attempt at a legacy was the disjointed effort to ban smoking forever for all children who had not yet picked up the habit – something that would have allowed Sunak for years to come to say he was “the prime minister that banned smoking”, but he defeated this dream himself with the timing of his early election call.

Rishi Sunak hoped his premiership could transcend its terrible beginnings, but the combination of the dire political situation, his fractious party and his own woeful lack of political talent meant this was never going to happen.

Instead, if he has a legacy, it will be as an embarrassing piece of political trivia. Rishi Sunak has lost even more seats than Arthur Balfour did in 1906 – Balfour had the previous record for the worst-ever performance, dropping 246 seats to 156. Sunak has fewer seats remaining, and lost more in the process.

Sunak did not hit the two-year mark that he had clearly aspired to, thanks to his misguided decision to call an election in summer. His resignation as party leader seems to be delayed slightly to allow the Conservatives to tweak the process to replace him – a necessary one, given their much-diminished numbers.

In short, Rishi Sunak was a man who failed to elevate his short premiership above its woeful beginning. The most damning indictment of his otherwise forgettable reign might be this: whoever takes over as Conservative leader next will inherit a situation so ghastly it makes Sunak’s start look positively rosy. That itself is a legacy, of a sort.