Cable Forum - View Single Post - The traditional CF voting intentions thread, week 5

**Hugh** · 26-06-2024, 11:33

Interesting article (imho) on why Rishi is making so many mis-steps recently…

tl:dr - he managed to rise without a trace…

https://thecritic.co.uk/the-rise-and-fall-of-rishi/

Quote:

How is Rishi Sunak so bad at this? Having posed the question some months ago, it’s time to have a crack at answering it. The election campaign has left little dispute about his lack of political nous: from the rainswept announcement, to the D-Day evacuation, to the response to the gambling scandal, he has repeatedly led his party like a man who has simply not encountered democratic politics before.

And at least part of the answer to the mystery of his ineptitude is that he hasn’t really. More than any prime minister of the last 50 years, Sunak has managed to reach the top without having to deal with the messy business of getting people to vote for him. Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair, David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson — they had all fought unwinnable seats for their parties and experienced the frustration of the opposition benches.

Sunak, instead, is a zoo baby: selected in 2015 for Richmond, until the last couple of weeks one of the safest Conservative seats in the country. He entered parliament just as his party won its first majority in decades. Young, glamorous, rich, from an ethnic minority, it’s hardly surprising that Cameron saw him as the future of the Tory party.

And this was merely the latest stop in a life that is remarkable for its happy path: Winchester, Oxford, Goldman Sachs, Stanford, marriage to an heiress, a hedge fund. Don’t take my word for it. By his own account the great hardship of his youth was a lack of satellite television.

Sunak’s astonishing run of good fortune continued in parliament. Few of those in the Brexit trenches remember it as an easy period, but Sunak was far from the fighting: a loyal backbencher and junior minister, dutifully voting for whatever his party’s policy was that week. His decision to back leaving the EU but not make a fuss about it was hardly a bold one. It was simply the smart thing for an ambitious backbencher to do.

In fact it reflected the dominant theme of Sunak’s political career: from getting selected for Richmond to becoming prime minister, what has mattered has always been the internal politics of the Tory party. This month is the first time that he has been forced to appeal to anyone who wasn’t a party member.

If tepidly backing Brexit in the referendum was his first characteristic decision, his second was to enthusiastically back Johnson for the party leadership in 2019. His article in The Times with Oliver Dowden and Robert Jenrick announcing that “Only Boris” could save the Conservatives was the moment the rest of us knew that the careerists had seen the future. Did they believe Johnson had the character to be prime minister? It hardly matters. They believed Johnson would win, and that supporting him could help them rise. He did, and it did. Sunak entered the Cabinet as Chief Secretary to the Treasury. Eight months later, he was Chancellor of the Exchequer, appointed because Dominic Cummings viewed him as more pliable than his predecessor Sajid Javid.

It’s tempting to ascribe such a meteoric rise to terrific talent. But aside from standing in at a 2019 debate when Johnson was hiding in a fridge somewhere, Sunak reached the second most powerful seat in the Cabinet without making a single notable contribution to British political life.