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.
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.
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SubscribeThere’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.
Well said, excellent post.
Totally agree. If the trend continues, the judiciary will start to just ignore new laws that have passed against their wishes.
They already do
No, politicians chain their own hands by passing the climate change act and bringing the European convention into British law etc. the Tories are particularly bad at trying to have it both ways; railing against the consequences of legislation that their own party has often supported.
Judges “ should be the anchor of the law, not the propellor.” an excellent way of putting it the core of the issue.
“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.
You are therefore arguing against the common law tradition here. Politics in general is much more left-wing than it was in Victorian times or before. (Obviously absolutely nobody believes in the Divine Right of Kings!). It is inevitable that the views of the judges will change along with those of wider society perhaps at a different pace.
I probably agree with you politically but just calling people that you don’t agree with names (student union politics) doesn’t solve the problem.
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.
‘Dominic Grieve or David Gauke’ as the most capable Tories?
That’s when I dropped my toast and marmalade.
Yes, such bizarre remarks undermine any sense in the piece
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.
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.
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.
Starmer is making Rishi look like a combination of Superman and Jesus and mandela.
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.
” 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.
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.
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.
That is a good point. Some purging of Remainers was undoubtedly necessary.
Still is.
“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.
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.
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.
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.
He would make a very fine number two to a Chancellor. I dont mean that disparagingly , it is the perfect job for him
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.
I can’t remember anything significant that Rishi Sunak achieved as Prime Minister. Nor do I think that he was a good Chancellor. His sole headline achievement was to hand out money during the COVID crisis – and in retrospect many are questioning how well he did that.
History may well see him as having been in the wrong place at the wrong time. He was thrust into Chancellorship because he was already at the Treasury, but at that stage he had little Ministerial experience. He stood for the leadership of the party because it was obvious that he had a good chance of being elected. Why anyone would have wanted to lead a party as divided as it was at that time is beyond me. As Prime Minister he did not face up to the division but rather did nothing that might upset a significant number of his MPs, despite having a big enough majority that he could have pushed through his policies.
He resigned as leader; he was not pushed out. He resigned despite there being no obvious successor. It would have been better for the country for him to continue to lead his party in Opposition and to have initiated an internal debate as to what the party ought to stand for. It is difficult to conceive a future Conservative government until after someone has done that and isolated the internal opposition to achieving whatever that brand of Conservatism might be.
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.
“Rishi Sanook”
We’re all Joe Biden now.
“Rashid”
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.
In listing Tory non-entities, you forgot John Major, unsurprisingly.
Who?
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.
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.
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.
I would say that this article makes some good points about the frivolous lack of seriousness of so many supposedly senior Tory politicians today, and indeed the vulgarity with which they carry out their politics. In this, the right wing has become much more like the left in recent years. You could also add, which the author notably doesn’t, that the Conservatives have tried to play it both ways in recent years by both talking tough on immigration whilst presiding over massive increases in it! This has probably more than any other issue contributed to public disillusionment with politics. You could never accuse the Thatcher governments of a similar sin.
However, there is also some very weak stuff in here: “No one seriously thinks that she [Truss] believes in anything”. Firstly, the “no one thinks” formulation is just lazy – just means that no evidence has to be provided. I think Truss’s entire personality made her unsuitable for being prime minister – she is almost incapable of good communication for one thing. However Truss with Kwame Kwarteng and others authored a book arguing vigorously that we need to liberalise and unleash the sluggish British economy. You might agree or disagree with this, but it is a strong position.
Rishi who?
That’s showbiz!
…for ugly people.
“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.
You have to admire the conviction of a man who announced the closure of the HS2 project in Manchester. Or was that stupidity?
Sunak’s attempts to sound sincere always reminded me of Tony Blair’s attempts. In fact, Sunak even sounded a bit like Phoney Tony.
Yes, the Blob.