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Will anyone miss Rishi Sunak? He represented the politics of conviction

Not just a technocrat. Adrian Dennis/AFP/Getty Images

Not just a technocrat. Adrian Dennis/AFP/Getty Images


October 29, 2024   6 mins

Rishi Sunak is creeping out of the Tory leadership like a mouse walking past a sleeping cat. This is a shame because his departure is significant, marking the end of a political era that began in the Eighties. Sunak’s hero is the former chancellor Nigel Lawson, who served under Thatcher from 1983 to 1989. At first glance, this seems odd. Lawson was more flamboyant than Sunak. He was also, in formal terms, less successful. Sunak has been and gone as prime minister at the age of 44. Lawson entered Parliament for the first time in his early forties and did not get into the Cabinet until he was almost 50.

In some ways, the relatively slow pace of Lawson’s political career is itself the point. Lawson was chancellor during the deregulation of the City of London in the “Big Bang” of 1986 and it was he, in 1988, who introduced a top rate of income tax of 40% — lower than it had been for many years before and lower than it is now. In short, Lawson achieved more without being prime minister than any recent prime minister achieved during their time in Downing Street. Lawson, in fact, was a rare example of a British politician who had the sense to recognise that his great gifts did not necessarily make him prime minister material. He was never a candidate for the leadership of his party.

One of the problems created by the febrile state of Conservative Party politics in the years since 2016 is that any Tory MP thinks he or she could be prime minister. Shortly after losing his parliamentary seat, Steve Baker gave an interview to Spectator TV in which he seemed to suggest that having read Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People gave him a unique insight into ”leadership”, equipping him to lead his party and his country. Sunak is the last survivor of an age when senior Tory politicians were expected to be substantial and able people. As well as Lawson, the Thatcher Cabinet contained, at various times, Michael Heseltine, Douglas Hurd, Ken Clarke, Cecil Parkinson and Norman Tebbit, all of whom achieved important things in their ministerial positions. All were people who might plausibly have been prime minster, or else have had a successful career out of Parliament. Heseltine, for one, had made a fortune in business. When he resigned from the Cabinet, he took his ministerial driver onto his own payroll — probably offering him more money and a flashier car to drive.

“Sunak is the last survivor of an age when senior Tory politicians were expected to be substantial and able people.”

Like Heseltine, Sunak had a successful career in business before he went into politics. His enemies sometimes say that he was well qualified for any position other than prime minister, but the alarming thing about his two potential successors is that they seem unqualified for all jobs as well as that of prime minister. If you were interviewing for a post in middle management and the recruitment agency sent you the CVs for Robert Jenrick and Kemi Badenoch, you would ask for your money back. Many of the most able Conservatives — Dominic Grieve or David Gauke — were driven out of the party by Boris Johnson, and I suspect that some Conservative MPs are beginning to feel uncomfortably like those Red Army soldiers in June 1941 who had to go into battle after Stalin had shot their best generals.

The second respect in which Sunak’s departure marks the end of an era relates to the politics of conviction. Sunak’s enemies portray him as a mere technocrat. They imply that he would be happier in the later stages of Ted Heath’s administration than in the government of Margaret Thatcher. This is an absurd misunderstanding. Having convictions, and being willing to act on them, is not the same as making statements about the importance of convictions. On the whole, the language of the Thatcher government was remarkably moderate. It had a small number of central principles and was usually pragmatic about the means by which it implemented them. Thatcher’s ministers did not, for example, say in public that they wished to crush the National Union of Mineworkers; they probably did not even say it in private until they had decided that there was no other means to get what they wanted. Compare this to the public war dances of senior Tories as they declare their willingness to fight some inoffensive institution — the Office for Budget Responsibility or European Convention on Human Rights — to which leader writers on the Daily Mail have taken a dislike.

Sunak talked soft but did more to implement the policies of the current Tory Right than any other front bencher. He voted for Brexit in 2016. As chancellor, he seems to have argued against lockdown more than any other minister and to have done the most to ease its impact. As prime minister, he did not even pay lip service to environmental policies — incidentally, this last stance would have pleased Lawson but exasperated Thatcher.

The contrast between Sunak and Liz Truss is particularly marked. Sunak is the urbane Jesuit who turns out to be willing to kill or be killed for his faith. Truss, by contrast, resembles a character in one of the more depressing Graham Greene novels. She believes in belief but does not have it. No one seriously thinks that she believes in anything. Perhaps she hopes that she will be granted the gift of ideological extremism if she goes on talking to Tucker Carlson — just as Greene’s characters hope that they will be granted the gift of faith if they keep on attending Mass and making their confessions.

If we truly want to understand why Sunak’s departure matters, we should think back to a phrase that Lawson coined to refer to the government’s Medium Term Financial Strategy in the early Eighties: “Rules Rule Ok.” It sounds a banal remark until one looks at the context. Lawson’s view was that economics must be governed by predictable and inflexible consequences — people must know that if they contracted debt they would have to pay it back and not see it inflated away. Lawson wanted to escape the notion that the government might suspend what he saw to be the rules of the market when it became electorally advantageous to do so. This meant, by the late Eighties, that Lawson supported the creation of an independent central bank. It was also the reason why Lawson was sometimes, at that time, interested in an alignment of European currencies. He would probably not, even then and even in private, have put it in such blunt terms but, effectively, he liked Europe for the very reason that modern Conservatives dislike it — because it keeps important decisions out of the grubby hands of the British electorate.

 A Conservative Party that revolved around rules had implications that extended beyond economics. Thatcherism was, above all, a response to the disorder of the Seventies — street crime and violent picket lines played a large role in the evolution of Conservative thought. It is interesting, incidentally, to note how often British Conservatives in the Seventies saw the United States — with its drugs, student protest and the dystopian chaos of New York in that decade — as a kind of anti-model for their own politics. More than anything else, Thatcher believed in the rule of law. It was, admittedly, an easy belief for a Conservative to sustain when so many judges made no secret of their own Right-wing opinions.

What has changed since then? One simple answer is that Thatcher won. Rules matter most to those who are weakest, and the British middle classes often felt weak in 1979. Ten years later, it was the organised working class which felt the need for protection — hence the increasing enthusiasm of trade unions for Europe and its myriad regulations. Anti-Europeanism became both a cause and effect of changes in the Conservative Party during the Nineties. The journalist Hugo Young noted that Eurosceptic Tories moved away from a belief in sound money as the desire to control their own currency became a feature of their case against the European Union.

Lawson, of course, became a Eurosceptic himself, as did his admirer Sunak. But this was partly because both men thought that the disciplines that they valued would be imposed at national level — particularly, of course, by the independent Bank of England that was created by Gordon Brown in 1997. Sunak’s case against Truss in the 2022 Tory leadership campaign was partly about fiscal discipline and the need to observe rules associated with the Bank of England, as well as the simpler and more brutal edicts issued by Her Majesty the Bond Market.

But the end of Sunakism is about more than economics. Sunak stands for personal qualities that would once have been valued by Conservatives. He is courteous and disciplined — one cannot imagine him referring to the Tory party as a “cuntocracy” which is, according to Boris Johnson, what another former minister did. Sunak’s enemies reproach him for not concluding a tacit or explicit alliance with Nigel Farage’s Reform Party. But, as the personal attacks on Sunak during the electoral campaign and the riots after it showed, Reform is intertwined with a violence and vulgarity that can easily slip into mob rule, a prospect that terrified the Thatcherites during the Seventies. Thatcher would have been stunned to hear Conservatives denouncing the police or expressing sympathy for rioters.

The truth is that the social groups which gained most from Thatcherism have little to fear now. Their privileges are safer than ever — the Labour government is obviously shaken at the prospect that its policies might cause the rich to leave the country or even that it might make the slightly less rich send their children back to state schools. Perhaps indeed, as a Marxist might suggest, the problem with the Conservative Party is precisely that it has ceased to be a useful instrument for the social class that was once behind it.

Oddly, the one group among the English bourgeoisie who look scared are Conservative front-benchers. Theirs is a miserable life. They may win the election in five years’ time but if they do, it will be back to the faction fights and plots of the last few years. Constituency parties are controlled by people who make the Trots at the grassroots of the Labour Party in 1978 look tolerant; all the while, the threat of Reform looms over party leaders. Perhaps the mystery is not that no talented person wants to lead the Conservative Party but rather that any sane person would even consider the prospect.


Richard Vinen is Professor of History at King’s College, London. His book Second City: Birmingham and the Forging of Modern Britain is out now.


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Seb Dakin
Seb Dakin
1 day ago

There’s bit in there about the judiciary being right-wing in the 80s. Whether right-wing or not, I think the judiciary ought to be conservative, as in instinctively reluctant to be an agent of change. It is their job to uphold the law, as in the existing law, not make new ones up on the hoof, or radically reinterpret law since by definition the cases coming before them are things that have already happened, and law if it is to be fair should not be retrospective.
In a common law system like the English one, obviously case law is law, so interpretations of judges form law and move it on, but as a profession the judiciary should not be social activists, they should be the anchor of the law, not the propellor.
People in a democracy wanting substantial changes to the law ought to get a mandate for them from the people in an election.

Claire Grey
Claire Grey
1 day ago
Reply to  Seb Dakin

Well said, excellent post.

Christopher Barclay
Christopher Barclay
1 day ago
Reply to  Seb Dakin

Totally agree. If the trend continues, the judiciary will start to just ignore new laws that have passed against their wishes.

Ethniciodo Rodenydo
Ethniciodo Rodenydo
23 hours ago

They already do

Simon
Simon
19 hours ago
Reply to  Seb Dakin

Judges “ should be the anchor of the law, not the propellor.” an excellent way of putting it the core of the issue.

John Riordan
John Riordan
17 hours ago
Reply to  Seb Dakin

“It is their job to uphold the law, as in the existing law, not make new ones up on the hoof, or radically reinterpret law since by definition the cases coming before them are things that have already happened, and law if it is to be fair should not be retrospective.”

Under the Common Law tradition of jurisprudence, it is exactly the job of a judge to “discover” law that is not yet written and to therefore create new legislation.

What is becoming apparent is that letting Progressives do this job is a terrible idea: it is something that only works when done by conservative-minded people (note the small “c”, I am not referring to people who vote Tory in this context). The conservatism is essential because where jurisprudence is concerned, the bar must necessarily be very high for a judge to decide that a departure from existing law is warranted. What we have now are a considerable number of clowns in ermine who think their own unreconstructed student union politics is a good enough reason to embark on new case law.

The law hasn’t been such an ass in living memory.

Last edited 2 hours ago by John Riordan
T T
T T
17 hours ago
Reply to  Seb Dakin

Excellent post. Many of today’s problems are caused by lawyers and judges incorporating their “progressive” political views into their work. It has to stop.

Claire Grey
Claire Grey
1 day ago

I think Rishi Sunak is a decent politician, not error free but then none of us are. Despite good intentions I do not think he was entirely comfortable as PM, he seems to have visibly relaxed now he is in opposition and has been much more effective.
I like him and hope very much he continues on the back benches, who knows what the future holds and his experience will be invaluable to Parliament. That’s if the Conservatives can pull themselves together of course.

Pedro Livreiro
Pedro Livreiro
1 day ago
Reply to  Claire Grey

Thoroughly agree – Sunak is not only a decent politician, but an admirable human being. I suspect that he was not hard-edged enough to deal with his fractious colleagues.
It also seems to me that Pitt (see comment above) chose to do everything himself because he was the only one able enough. We have not had a decent manager of the Cabinet since Thatcher and before that Attlee.

Louise Henson
Louise Henson
22 hours ago

An interesting article but the author has some curious notions about ‘able Conservatives’. If I may borrow the words of Tim Stanley of the Telegraph: Dominic Grieve and David Gauke are only Conservatives in the sense that Jeremy Clarkson is a nun.

Ben Jones
Ben Jones
1 day ago

‘Dominic Grieve or David Gauke’ as the most capable Tories?
That’s when I dropped my toast and marmalade.

JR Stoker
JR Stoker
22 hours ago
Reply to  Ben Jones

Yes, such bizarre remarks undermine any sense in the piece

Alison R Tyler
Alison R Tyler
21 hours ago

I will miss him he is intelligent thoughtful and not corrupt. He was rich and able enough not to need the money. I trust his judgement and his motivation. He was ethical and a person of genuine religious faith.

William Cameron
William Cameron
20 hours ago

Starmer is making Rishi look like a combination of Superman and Jesus and mandela.

Michael Cazaly
Michael Cazaly
1 day ago

Rules rule ok…indeed. And when every Party said they would accept the result of the Referendum, Gauke and Grieve didn’t…the rules obviously didn’t apply to them.

Martin M
Martin M
1 day ago
Reply to  Michael Cazaly

That is a good point. Some purging of Remainers was undoubtedly necessary.

Dee Harris
Dee Harris
18 hours ago
Reply to  Martin M

Still is.

Richard Calhoun
Richard Calhoun
15 hours ago

Dominic Grieve was driven out ot the Tory party by Boris Johnson, but his constituents.
He constantly went against our wishes, lost 2 votes of no confidence called by his constituents.
He was a bad MP who flaunted democracy tried his utmost to stop our democratic mandate, Brexit.

Philip Stott
Philip Stott
14 hours ago

” If you were interviewing for a post in middle management and the recruitment agency sent you the CVs for Robert Jenrick and Kemi Badenoch, you would ask for your money back.”
How much of a sneering richard head are you?
I don’t know about Jenrick, but Kemi has an undergraduate degree in computer systems engineering, and a masters in engineering.
I look forward to someone of who is not an Oxbridge PPE graduate leading the conservatives.

Last edited 14 hours ago by Philip Stott
Martin M
Martin M
1 day ago

I will miss Sunak. I think is is a decent man who (mostly) did his best. That said, I don’t think that he was quite up to being PM (although that may be because he didn’t really hanker for the job in the same way many politicians do). The one area where he fell down is that his heart wasn’t in the last election. In fact, he might have been better handing over to someone else 6 months out. In the interests of full disclosure, I should say that Sunak and I have the same home town.

David McKee
David McKee
1 day ago
Reply to  Martin M

Oddly enough, I’ll miss him too. Under normal circumstances, he might have been a fine PM. But he inherited a fractious party that had been in power too long, the backwash from the policy errors of his two predecessors, a cabinet of inadequates… he was pretty screwed from the start.

He had never fought a competitive election outside the Conservative Party before. As we all discovered, a general election is no place for a beginner.

Christopher Barclay
Christopher Barclay
1 day ago

Putting the Bank of England in the grubby hands of the bankers (a.k.a. making it ‘independent’) did not lead to stable prices but to the debasement of sterling. Right from the start, Chancellor Brown ensured that inflationary house prices would be ignored. Following the financial crash of 2008, Britain was turned from an entrepreneurial economy to a rentier economy as house prices disappeared from the grasp of most people and it became impossible to save for a pension.
Steve Baker did not see himself as a possible PM because of a book he had read but on the basis of his career in management and accountancy before becoming an MP. As an MP, Baker called for banks to re-adopt GAAP to account for devalued and failed loans. He highlighted how the use of IFRS instead of GAAP over-stated the strength banks’ balance sheets. He introduced a bill to ‘bring casino banking into the light’, by changing the rules by which banks account for derivatives. His knowledge of banking would be of great use come the next financial crisis.

JR Stoker
JR Stoker
22 hours ago

He would make a very fine number two to a Chancellor. I dont mean that disparagingly , it is the perfect job for him

Anna Bramwell
Anna Bramwell
20 hours ago

And the IMF in 2004 warning Brown about the housing bubble.
Yet it has been the key aim of all governments since then to ensure that house prices srayed high and went higher.

John Riordan
John Riordan
18 hours ago

“It was also the reason why Lawson was sometimes, at that time, interested in an alignment of European currencies. He would probably not, even then and even in private, have put it in such blunt terms but, effectively, he liked Europe for the very reason that modern Conservatives dislike it — because it keeps important decisions out of the grubby hands of the British electorate.”

He would also have changed his mind when he saw the catastrophic damage that the Euro has done to the European economies which possess it. In fact, he did indeed change his mind on the question and said so publicly.

David McKee
David McKee
1 day ago

Prof. Vinen thinks the Conservative Party is unleadable. Maybe he’s right. A lot of people will have to pull themselves together to prove he’s wrong though.

“Interviewing for a post in middle management…” Well, we’ve been here before. In 1783, an entire generation of political leaders was discredited in the aftermath of losing America. In desperation, George III offered the premiership to a young man of 24. “A sight to make surrounding nations stare. / A kingdom trusted to a schoolboy’s care.”

Mercifully, Pitt turned out to be one of our most able leaders. Sunak should count his blessings. He’s a has-been at 44; Pitt was dead at 46.

j watson
j watson
1 day ago

Good Article. Does once again highlight the contradictions in Right wing thinking that it continues to struggle to square. And then coupled with the increasing tendency to select ‘performative’ leaders who echo members over-simplistic understanding of problems, things were never going to end well.
Sunak was dealt a terrible position though and history will be kinder to him than the electorate last summer.
The Author veers into a bit too much Lawson hagiography. (Tories do the same with Thatcher as distance makes the specs even more rose tinted by the year). Lawson created a 2nd Thatcher era recession and plunged millions into negative equity. He jumped knowing and being smart enough to recognise he’d set this in train. He probably also recognised the Tories had further fuelled a serious imbalance in the UK economy that favoured ‘finance’ over other industries and accelerated the North/South divide. He then developed his EU scepticism whilst opting to live in France. That’s fine, but clearly it wasn’t so bad after all and he preferred it to the UK. Practice what you preach etc.

JR Stoker
JR Stoker
18 hours ago
Reply to  j watson

I once found myself agreeing with Mr Watson, can’t remember over what, but he’s back to utter nonsense, thank goodness. You know he doesn’t make sense, ever. Except that once.

Lancashire Lad
Lancashire Lad
1 day ago

“Rishi Sanook”
We’re all Joe Biden now.

Richard Rolfe
Richard Rolfe
19 hours ago
Reply to  Lancashire Lad

“Rashid”

A Robot
A Robot
1 day ago

“He represented the politics of conviction”. That’ll be the conviction that the Northern English white working class had swung to voting Tory so that he could increase immigration.

Christopher Barclay
Christopher Barclay
1 day ago
Reply to  A Robot

You have to admire the conviction of a man who announced the closure of the HS2 project in Manchester. Or was that stupidity?

A Robot
A Robot
1 day ago

Sunak’s attempts to sound sincere always reminded me of Tony Blair’s attempts. In fact, Sunak even sounded a bit like Phoney Tony.

David Hedley
David Hedley
5 hours ago

I generally echo the positive view of Sunak expressed here. At another time, he might have shown more zeal and inspiration as a PM; it was his misfortune to follow Johnson and Truss. I believe he realised that he would be punished like Truss if he attempted to execute any radical policies, and consequently he (1) stabilised and improved the economy, with a mini investment boom in new technologies, and (2) decided to call an early election, as the Tory factional fighting would probably have reached a head in September/October, with more and more defections to Reform. The election date will, I believe, be seen with hindsight as a good call, not least as Starmer is rapidly becoming a singularly despised PM.

Christopher Barclay
Christopher Barclay
1 day ago

Sunak is happy to follow in the footsteps of a long line of nonentities, probably because he is happy to resume the well-paid career he had before politics. The most remarkable aspect of Cameron was how he disappeared effortlessly from view despite having been PM for 6 years. His hero Blair was employed by a US investment bank and other prominent organisations. Even Osborne had his uses to foreign oligarchs. May has perfected her Ted Heath impersonation on the Tory backbenches. Truss is a joke and unemployable. Johnston’s memoirs are of interest only to the Telegraph. It would be interesting to know if Sunak thinks it was a mistake to enter politics.

Geoff W
Geoff W
23 hours ago

In listing Tory non-entities, you forgot John Major, unsurprisingly.

JR Stoker
JR Stoker
22 hours ago
Reply to  Geoff W

Who?

John Tyler
John Tyler
18 hours ago

Yes, the Blob.

Geoff W
Geoff W
1 day ago

Rishi who?

Ben Jones
Ben Jones
1 day ago
Reply to  Geoff W

That’s showbiz!

Geoff W
Geoff W
23 hours ago
Reply to  Ben Jones

…for ugly people.