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

A borderline millennial in his natural habitat. (Jacob King - WPA Pool/Getty Images)

A borderline millennial in his natural habitat. (Jacob King - WPA Pool/Getty Images)


July 26, 2024   4 mins

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.

“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.


Travis Aaroe is a freelance writer


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David McKee
David McKee
3 months ago

Whoa now, just a minute! Sunak was PM for 21 months, at the fag end of an exhausted Conservative government. His chances of success of any description were slim. Let’s not generalise from the particular.

Yet there’s a grain of truth here. Britain has been drifting for the last 30 years: Major’s quietism, Blair’s botched reforms as jobs drained away to China, Cameron taking the easy way out of everything, the chaos of Brexit, Covid and Ukraine. Britain has been poorly led for the whole adult lifetime of the millennials. Will Starmer be the exception? Um, well…

Samuel Ross
Samuel Ross
3 months ago

This was an eye-opening article. My thanks to the author. I now have something to ponder for a while, while I get on with the business of living my boring day. 😉

Bret Larson
Bret Larson
3 months ago

If Corbynism is their touchstone they deserve failure.

Simon Blanchard
Simon Blanchard
3 months ago
Reply to  Bret Larson

To the young, Corbynism offered a ray of hope. It’s easy to be cynical from the vantage point of experience.

Martin M
Martin M
3 months ago

Yeah. The “experience” of seeing what Socialism produces when it is actually applied.

Judy Johnson
Judy Johnson
3 months ago
Reply to  Martin M

Corbyn did not have the opportunity to apply socialism (thankfully!). It is all too easy to make generalisations about political parties to which we are opposed.

Norfolk Sceptic
Norfolk Sceptic
3 months ago

They trusted the State to look after them, the universities to educate them, nationalised entities for employment, and their government to save the World.

What could go wrong?

Billy Bob
Billy Bob
3 months ago

They paid vast sums of money to go to university because the older generations promised them a graduate premium on their wages if they did, which obviously never materialised. All the nationalised entities had long since been sold off (and the cash pocketed) by the time millennials came of age. They know they will receive much less off the state than the boomer generation will, despite being more heavily taxed. Despite working longer hours on average than those that came before they’re much less likely to be able to afford a family home.
All in all they’ve been dealt a pretty s**t hand wouldn’t you agree?

Robert Harris
Robert Harris
3 months ago

“To the young, Corbynism offered a ray of hope:” Unless you were a young Jew.

Dumetrius
Dumetrius
3 months ago

They principally descended on Corbynism as a path back to the EU. In other words, they ignored just about everything the bloke had said for thirty years.

Lancashire Lad
Lancashire Lad
3 months ago

A pile of confected, ahistorical nonsense.

Martin M
Martin M
3 months ago

Corbynism was the authentic cause of Britain’s millennials“. I can certainly see their problem.

Katharine Eyre
Katharine Eyre
3 months ago

Some points:
“Borderline millennial”. I think you’ll find you mean “geriatric millennial”, i.e. those of us who landed between 1980 and 1985 (https://index.medium.com/why-the-hybrid-workforce-of-the-future-depends-on-the-geriatric-millennial-6f9ff4de1d23)
Unemployment is not a “raffish existence”.
Corbynism as the authentic millennial cause: are you mad? I might be half a continent away and so avoided some of the maladies afflicting millennials in Britain post-2004, but we were born in the early 80s, we didn’t have a lobotomy. I was into Corbynism like I’m into licking vomit up off the pavement.
You’re dead right about “checking out of history”. I started out wanting to be an investment banker. Now my sole ambition is to earn enough not to have to engage with the outside world any more than I really have to. It’s still a goal. Emily Dickinson is my hermetic role model.
BUT: I am falling back on the mannerisms and habits of my silent generation grandparents, not my boomer parents.
The inherited pieties you speak of will never be thrown overboard until the boomer generation is no longer around. Of course the millennials absorbed those pieties and it’s hard to shake off things you learned as truth in your formative years. But there is no “false consciousness”: the reason Sunak never surmounted those pieties politically is that he still had to get the votes of boomers, who are still in (and will remain in) that old framework of assumptions that fit the pre-digital world and don’t really have any personal or financial interest in changing things.
How that translates on a personal level: being home with my parents throws me for an absolute loop these days. On the one hand it’s nice and cosy, they have a house and a garden and I get the comforting feeling of being back in the security of childhood. On the other hand, it causes me a kind of anguish. I fully know that this is part of a vanished world already, but while you are there, you trot along in the same patterns of behaviour so you all get along, don’t question their lifestyle, thoughtless consumption or insane generational privilege because it will upset them and it’s all quite performative. As the linked article says, millennials are fluent in pre-digital and digital worlds and are used to this kind of diplomacy. But, to reach for the parlance of my idyllic British millennial youth: it does my head in.

Dumetrius
Dumetrius
3 months ago
Reply to  Katharine Eyre

Unemployment is ‘raffish’ in about the same way bedbugs are.

Jacob Atkinson
Jacob Atkinson
2 months ago
Reply to  Katharine Eyre

I am falling back on the mannerisms and habits of my silent generation grandparents, not my boomer parents.

And I’m doing the same as a 25-year-old Zoomer. The Silent Generation were as hard as nails and didn’t take any nonsense from anyone. They went out and did what had to be done (‘just get on with it’ being a dominant sentiment). They didn’t spend their time in Teams break-out rooms mewling about their Mental Elf. They protected and preserved their communities. My grandparents were married for 65 years and dedicated themselves to their family. They weren’t materially rich, but by God, they were rich in all the ways that actually mattered.
And now? We have two generations, almost three, the vast majority of whom have spat in the face of everything they built just so they can maintain the delusion that they’re ‘living their best life’. And these are the people I’m supposed to respect, because they have more ‘life experience’? Nah.
More power to your elbow, Katherine. I’ve enjoyed reading your insightful comments. Maybe you should pitch a piece to UnHerd. It would certainly be better than this one!

j watson
j watson
3 months ago

Bit of a ramble that. Nonetheless prompts reflection on the increasing tendency to divide people into groups- in this instance inter-generational. Generally I’ve instinctive abreaction – too simplistic etc – but there is no doubt my generation had v significant advantages younger generations have now had removed. This has yet to generate the political reaction one might expect but unless Starmer can arrest this, and I think he ‘gets’ it, the bonds that tie generations together will come under immense strain.

Andrew McDonald
Andrew McDonald
3 months ago
Reply to  j watson

….and of course if you want a generational hard luck story, you can find it anywhere if you select carefully. So – ‘My late-Boomer generation wasted their student years on pointless but sincere agitprop and emerged slap into the oil crisis and the three-day week, followed by feeble political loss of leadership, 21% inflation post-Wilson/Callaghan, and the harsh pendulum years of Thatcherite unemployment and cultural austerity – only to have our struggle for a place on the property ladder crushed under 15% mortgages and a price slump…’ Easy! Who’s next?

j watson
j watson
3 months ago

Selective there as you well know AD.
Why is rate of home ownership decreasing amongst our younger whilst for us it constantly rose?
Why did we have decent work pensions and leave education without huge debt? The list goes on.
It’s painful but we’ve been far from the ‘greatest generation’ that bequeathed us.

Walter Marvell
Walter Marvell
3 months ago
Reply to  j watson

There are easy answers to these differences.
If you want to look for them (no expectations..). Houses were affordable right up to the moment when Blair and EU free movement engineered a mass migratory tsunami of demand – 5 million unplanned arrivals – whilst keeping a tight grip on supply via our restrictive planning regime. Nice if you have a portfolio of 30 homes no Tony?? The greatest heist in UK history giving £1m+ cap gains in a decade to most London and SE Remainiac householders. One wonders why this entitled cohort fought Brexit so hard….Similarly, Blairite social engineering – the 50% of kids rather than the normal 10% into hundreds of greedy crap unis – is the reason why this generation are saddled with student debt.

Walter Marvell
Walter Marvell
3 months ago

Rather bewildering. Rishi is a most unlikely representative of the Millenials. A moral man with a few conservative instincts, he proved to be a very weak leader in bowing meekly to the admittedly crushing weight of the established leftist Progressive New Order (as all the Fake Tory Serfs did). That generation are slaves to a rogue EU/Blairite experiment in governance & society which we now can see guarantees the poor saps their immiseration in an anti growth system. Bow to mass uncontrolled and unplanned immigration and you smash your public services. Have a State pay you to stay at home for two years and you smash the work ethic, and you get trolled by a workshy wfh public sector. Impose cripplingly high taxes on corporations and savings and energy and you can kiss goodbye your dreams of growth. Bow to the prevailing progressive ideologies of identitarianism equality eco catastrophism and the rejection of both meritiocracy and belief in wealth creation and you guarantee your failure. You live in the fourth decade of a revolution which is gangrenous and has failed. See it for what it is. Fight it. Or surrender to its inevitable consequences.

Tyler Durden
Tyler Durden
3 months ago
Reply to  Walter Marvell

Yes, he has conservative instincts which express the world view at the 1975-80 end of Generation X.

Tyler Durden
Tyler Durden
3 months ago

Rishi Sunak is not even a borderline Millennial, he’s merely at the young end of Gen X. His politics have little to do with Millennial philosophy either. Macron and Trudeaubare young Gen X too.
In contrast, JD Vance is wholly a Millennial and expresses the philosophy of the generation that got Trump elected or became hysterical when he was.

Katharine Eyre
Katharine Eyre
3 months ago

Don’t know where my other comment has gone to, so I’ll add thoughts here:
I reject the idea of false consciousness but there are several intentional deceptions which I choose to cling to so I can still summon the will to get out of bed, sit down and work each day.
The first is that there is, or still can be, a society as I understand it, as in a group of people living together according to shared values and feeling obligated towards each other and their shared world so that you want to contribute, do your bit. The reality I see outside does not reflect this vision at all which is why I have withdrawn from the world so much (as mentioned in my first comment, wherever that is in the Unherd ether).
The second is that there is such a thing as democracy.
Now, I am clinging onto these visions with my fingernails, but if I can’t fool myself about them anymore, then I’ll have to accept that the future is a dark place where we live among the ruins of multicultural liberal democracy where sectarian conflict is rife.
And that is not a very healthy place to be mentally. So I carry on voting and participating in political conversation and banging on merrily about social contracts as if that actually means something.

Dumetrius
Dumetrius
3 months ago
Reply to  Katharine Eyre

I don’t think it’s at all false consciousness or an intentional deception to act that way when you step out the door into society.

If you act kindly and with gentleness to people, they may carry a bit of that away and do the same for the next person they run into.

This is a real case where ‘every little helps.’ A deception that has at least a chance of becoming real.

J B
J B
3 months ago

Satire is not dead!
A subtle and nuanced comedy piece.

Tom K
Tom K
3 months ago

Bizarre article conflating different groups and over-generalisng in a desperately shallow way. Millennials’ parents are the Britpop generation? Only if their mothers got pregnant at 10. Some desk editor should have bounced this piece back with notes on illogicalities and inconsitencies, and requested (at best) a re-write.

RA Znayder
RA Znayder
3 months ago

Millenials are one of the first generations of the modern age who radicalize as they grow older. That in itself makes them interesting.

This is probably because of timing. Millenials lived in a comfortable but boring world where almost nothing really changed. Then the GFC of 2008 happened. What many don’t like to admit is that this might have been much more than an ordinary financial crash. It showed a bigger problem: that much of this postindusrial neoliberal society might have been a corrupt lie all along.

But instead of some big changed the status quo doubled down on everything that caused it. More financial manipulation, more PR, more culture war, more debt, more stagnation. In the 80s we suspected things might get bad, but instead of a Cyberpunk dystopia we go nowhere near the technological progress anticipated. We got a boring dystopia.

After 2008 everything was turned into a bubble with the help of central banks. One giant Ponzi. The asset prize inflation and the tech boom are very similar things really. As far as I can see, people like Sunak – coming from private equity – are simply the benefactors of this central bank supported Ponzi. What innovations did he develop to deserve his wealth? Since these post-2008 bubbles were inflated by so much Public money we should wonder if people like that are not simply a giant welfare queens. And if that is true the problem is also clear, those who are very comfortable really want to keep this Ponzi going and prevent people from waking up. But for millenials it’s not too late to become a very interesting generation I think.

Katharine Eyre
Katharine Eyre
3 months ago
Reply to  RA Znayder

This is probably because of timing. Millenials lived in a comfortable but boring world where almost nothing really changed.
Yes, quite – we were told that history had ended in 1989 (some of us do actually remember watching the Berlin Wall come down on TV) and that it was all going to be absolutely fine forever, our side was right, we had won, ha-jolly-ha, pity the poor things living in the former eastern bloc living in the ruins of their giant socio-economic mistakes.
There was an article the other day which referred to a “millennial philosophy” which made me snort with derision, as I was not aware we had to have one.
You tend to need things like big ideas for society and philosophies if your world is confusing and fast-changing, because they give you a framework to make sense of it. And that simply wasn’t the world the millennials were born into. It’s the world we’ve been involuntarily pitched into without having been educated or formally prepared for it.
These days, you don’t pity the people who remember and lived through Communism and its demise. You quite envy them. Partly because they haven’t made some of the mistakes we in Western Europe have in our arrogance (multiculturalism, mass immigration of vastly different, perhaps terminally incompatible cultures) and are therefore blissfully free of the problems which are starting to plague us now (anyone else “enjoying” a round of Chechen vs. Syrian gang violence?) You also might want to look to them and learn how to rebound from a comprehensive systemic crash.

Agnes Aurelius
Agnes Aurelius
3 months ago

I think RA Znayder makes an interesting comment. But this is an interesting article. I have 3 sons born 1984 -1990. Eldest emigrated to USA is in the tech business very successful. 2nd is a consultant surgeon. 3rd lives in Rwanda. His company takes solar powered electricity to rural areas, refugee camps, and various other ventures. He has managed to pay of half his student debt but is now paying 6.5% interest on it. Interest on student debt is obscene let alone interest at this level. He has a Masters Mechanical Engineering degree but many of his peers are in soul destroying jobs in non productive finance jobs to pay off their debt. They envy my sons job satisfaction but he had to be abroad to get it.

Richard C
Richard C
3 months ago

OMG – a phrase I think was spawned by millennials – why is Unherd publishing the superficial rantings of a 6th form paper?
Rishi Sunak is not a tragic figure, he made choices, almost all of them bad and other people are going to be punished for his serial incompetence by Keir Starmer. He deserves no sympathy whatsoever.

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
3 months ago

First though in reading this was “jeez, what a long-sustained whine.” Being from this side of the pond, I recognize the narrative, particularly among young American women. Perfect fodder for the totalitarian left.

John Riordan
John Riordan
3 months ago

That’s a very interesting analysis of the millennial generation, slightly marred by the fact that Rishi Sunak simply isn’t representative.

It’s also a tangentially riveting insight into the Blair era and the obnoxious pieties and contrived ethics of that era, that continue to infest public life at every level and which are the principle cause of statist sclerosis we’re stuck with, seemingly no matter who which party we vote into government.

David Lindsay
David Lindsay
3 months ago

The Golden Britpop Summer of 1995 was in the middle of my time in the Sixth Form, meaning that I was a first time General Election voter in 1997. This article, although it has promise, required strenuous editing that it did not receive.