https://www.theguardian.com/politics/ng ... on-resultp
‘A difficult hand played poorly’: how No 10 slipped from Sunak’s grasp
Dan Sabbagh, 6 Jul 2024
Rishi Sunak became Britain’s prime minister quickly and unexpectedly in October 2022 after the short, financially catastrophic premiership of Liz Truss and the leadership of Boris Johnson, whose loose moral compass had allowed Downing Street to party while the rest of the UK was locked down.
The economic situation was dire – inflation at 11%, mortgages threatening to soar by £5,000 a year – and the political inheritance more desperate. But since then the 44-year-old prime minister has failed to turn around the Conservative’s fortunes. Lacking a transformative touch, he led the party to a historic defeat.
“Undoubtedly, Rishi had a difficult hand,” said Lee Cain, a former No 10 director of communications under Johnson who has also advised Sunak and now runs his own firm, Charlesbye Strategy.
“But he played it poorly. He had broadly the wrong strategy from the start, in an environment where people were crying out for change. You heard it in every focus group, but Rishi came in and positioned himself as the status quo candidate.”
Team Sunak’s original plan was to under-promise and over-deliver. On the day he started, his Conservatives were 30 points behind the Labour opposition in the polls. In his first address to the nation as prime minister, Sunak promised “integrity, professionalism and accountability” and said: “Trust is earned. And I will earn yours.”
There are arguably two Sunaks. The first is an immigrant success story: a British Asian from Southampton, Hampshire, a practising Hindu, the son of a GP and pharmacist, who made the historic achievement of becoming the UK’s first non-white prime minister. At the age 42, he was the youngest leader of the country in more than 200 years.
The other is a full member of Britain’s old fashioned establishment, who studied at the fee-paying Winchester College, then Oxford, before a career in the City of London and California’s Silicon Valley and a plum seat in parliament. This is the man married to a wealthy heiress, Akshata Murty, whose shareholding in the Indian IT business her father co-founded is worth nearly £600m.
In a period – and an election – dominated by concerns of the British public about the soaring cost of energy and living costs, it was the second that won out. During his time in office, stories routinely appeared reflecting Sunak’s wealth, making him appear out of touch. A heated 12-metre (40ft) pool in his Yorkshire home used so much power that the local electricity network had to be upgraded.
In Downing Street, the central strategy was to restore financial credibility, and the first of five promises made in January 2023 was to halve inflation. “He believed in sound money, not a cause that made anybody’s heart beat faster,” said Andrew Gimson, the author of a history of Britain’s prime ministers, and a biography of Johnson.
As a politician, Sunak had risen fast, perhaps too fast. He first became an MP in 2015, in the normally safe Conservative seat of Richmond, North Yorkshire, and was promoted to chancellor in February 2020 when Johnson’s advisory team thought he would be more malleable than predecessor, Sajid Javid.
Though an economic liberal by instinct, during the coronavirus crisis Sunak introduced the radical furlough scheme, where the state paid 80% of the wages of employees who were suddenly without work. He referred to it as his greatest political success, necessary because “I saw a country whose future hung in the balance”.
A few months later, Sunak launched a controversial “eat out to help out” scheme, later referred to by Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer for England, as “eat out to help the virus”.
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Gautam
In India section whenever in a blue moon they had an article that was open for comments I would counter with facts.