Rishi Sunak is a millennial tragedy He is an avatar for a bruised generation

Rishi Sunak is a borderline millennial and the salient characteristic of Britain’s millennials has been defeat. Few generations have been so ceaselessly battered by events; by 2020, their time on the stage of history had ended in total rout: financial, political, cultural.

Their timing has been awful. Every critical stage in their lives has coincided with disaster. Britain’s millennials were fresh out of university during the crash of 2008, and were struck again by lockdown on the cusp of middle age. Having no assets, they saw no benefit from the asset price inflation of the intervening decade. Unlike their American counterparts, Britain had no tech boom to make at least a few of them rich, or to serve as an outlet for their talents. Nor were they, as in continental Europe, cushioned through the long barren years by things like perpetual studenthood. Britain’s millennials instead had to settle for the quietism of the graduate scheme.

Unlike Gen Z, they are too proud to keep up a raffish existence on the margins, through streaming, cryptocurrency, the monetising of hobbies, or outright unemployment. But even the path of respectability has availed them little. Britain’s private sector has slower progression than in America, and is famously parsimonious with its salaries. Millennials are underpaid, overtaxed and overcharged for everything.

Politically they have also failed. Corbynism was the authentic cause of Britain’s millennials; it, alone, made at least some attempt to speak to their material interests — like student debt. All was soon blown off course by Brexit, an issue that millennials were entirely indifferent to. Nor can they claim to be any kind of cultural vanguard. Throughout the 2010s, Britain had no campus movement to speak of, no Antifa formation of any significance. All social reforms in Britain have been carried out by fiat from above, by Roy Jenkins in the Sixties or David Cameron in 2011.

Other generations have had their share of trials. But here’s the key difference: with millennials, none of these have brought any edification whatsoever. Bankrupted, locked indoors, wages winnowed away. For previous generations, war and disaster at least brought opportunities for advancement, and a general burning away of societal deadwood. The generation of Frenchmen who survived the Napoleonic Wars could look forward to the comfortable mediocrity of the 19th century. Not so with the millennials, who have been given neither catharsis nor a quiet life. Theirs was not the kind of adversity that hardens, only the kind that makes you curl up into a defensive ball, perhaps never to come out.

So it proved. British millennials are dutiful, conscientious, courteous almost to a fault. But they have essentially checked out of history. In most things British millennials have now simply fallen back on the tastes and assumptions of their parents — the Britpopper generation. They fawn endlessly over grandees like Ian Hislop. They’ve even taken their parents’ enemies for their own, like Margaret Thatcher, someone who left office before many of them were even born. Generational deference can even be seen in the music of the millennials, in Ed Sheeran’s strange thraldom to Elton John.

As prime minister, Rishi Sunak went along in a similar vein. Of millennials he was, of course an atypical one: a Thatcherite who shared in none of their money woes. But Sunak — along with colleagues Suella Braverman, Robert Jenrick, and Claire Coutinho — was Britain’s first real experiment in millennial governance. Little was ever made of this. Unlike Blair and Brown, or the Conservative modernisers, there was never any self-sense of a rising group of youngsters ready to challenge the incumbents. That would require the breezy confidence of youth which Britain’s millennials had beaten out of them long ago.

This is the story of Rishi Sunak and his government, told one way: a younger generation dutifully upholding a set of inherited pieties that are basically alien to them. Sunak and his colleagues were the first true digital natives to hold high office, but they were called upon to defend an essentially analog worldview, these Alastair Campbellisms, which holds that the exact conditions of Britain in 1997 must be defended to the last.

Sunak, for his part, was a man of the 21st century. He had built up a fortune in private equity, and had, in Silicon Valley, seen a world beyond Britain and its “broadcast ecology”. But because of their generational hang-ups, people like Sunak never found the courage to tell Britain’s gerontocrats to get with the programme: that the United Kingdom cannot in fact maintain first-world living standards with “world-beating creative industries”, and that we might learn something from the healthcare systems of France or Singapore. At the very least, they were willing to log on to the internet and read about these things, a task that has always proven beyond the Britpopper generation.

Rishi Sunak was thus one of the few “Wets” in the true sense of the term: someone who recognises what the historical moment demands of them, but dithers and temporises endlessly. He was talked out of things. His younger colleagues were taken from him. He suffered himself to be ridiculed for taking an early interest in AI, something that is set to transform all our lives. Internet use was second nature to him, but he went along with absurd legislation against online trolls that nearly caused WhatsApp to delete itself from the UK market.

But the subordination was never quite total. After all, Britain’s millennials did not share in the generational experiences that produced New Labour and the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympics; for them these “collective memories” are to be obeyed, not really believed in. When Rishi Sunak as Chancellor presented a new “Diversity Built Britain” coin, he was repeating the pieties of what is to him simply a public doctrine.

As millennials come into power, there will be a moment when this false consciousness breaks for good; when it is realised that these inherited pieties are what’s keeping them poor and diminished. Ending debt vassalage to the aged, school selection by property, and fiduciary obligations to non-citizens would each represent a huge social and financial windfall for them. They simply have to learn to say no.

This looks some way off. With the new administration, the British state has reverted to the Britpoppers, and ripe ones at that — Keir Starmer is 61, Sue Gray a stately 66. But I wonder. Even now, a millennial like Wes Streeting can say astonishingly frank things about the NHS: to the extent that the health service ever was a national religion, it certainly isn’t for people of Streeting’s age, who have actually heard about the alternatives.

No doubt, at some point in the future, a 34-year-old technologist from the Tony Blair Institute will chafe at being told by an ageing “Comms Guru” that his latest procurement request is unworkable, unlawful, and violates the Nolan Principle of Openness. In overthrowing these pieties, what is now the greatest weakness of the millennials will become their greatest strength: general disillusion.