We love a loser in Britain. From Eddie the Eagle to Gareth Southgate, our default reaction to a lack of success is warm appreciation. Parliament in that regard could not have been kinder to Rishi Sunak on his return as Leader of the Opposition. Never mind that the Conservative Party now looks more like the garrison of Rourke’s Drift than a campaign army. Never mind that the majority lies speared in the dust from their July 4th Isandlwana. Never mind that on the horizon General Farage is stirring the nativists for a future Bore War. The Lord Chelmsford of Prime Ministers marches on.

Less allegorically, Sunak, having made a couple of good speeches, is as one commentator put it “precisely the leader the Conservative Party needs right now.” On a personal level he is clearly a lovely guy, smart, capable, talented and has a very bright Clegg-like future ahead of him, whether in the valley or teaming up with Tony Blair to hawk AI to dictators. He is being feted by all the usual suspects who regard Parliament as a jolly club for centrist dads. Little thought however has been put into how this comes across to the poor bloody Tory infantry still pulling the bodies out of the metaphorical Buffalo River, wondering whether the inexperienced lieutenants rowing in the redoubts have what it takes to hold the line.

 So let us be blunt, as a leader Sunak was hopeless. He had no coherent ideology or vision. He treated consensus building as an end in itself rather than as a means to an end. Even then he was better at building coalitions against rather than for him and was advised by people who used polls to tell them what to think, rather than as tools to move the public their way. He was neither a campaigner nor a political strategist.

As a result, he demonstrated cataclysmic judgement on the timing of the election. Whether this was through arrogance, naivety, or ignorance, he amplified the losses. He did so in the teeth of ample public commentary praising an assumed wise decision to delay until winter. Catching his own side by surprise, benefitting only morally vacuous apparatchiks boosting their betting accounts, and a far better prepared Opposition. 

In office he was addicted to fad policies like generational bans, the Rwanda scheme, and the triple lock. He ducked hard choices on growth like building homes and cutting red tape, both things his deeply buried Thatcherite instincts should have told him were fights worth having. He was useless at implementation. Note, for example, the failure of his own borders policy or thinking through how to reform Ed Miliband’s ideological Net Zero architecture into something pragmatic.

He was right about one big thing — the importance of fiscal prudence and sound money. But he was also the Chancellor who undermined that prudence with wasteful lockdown splurges that destroyed growth and pushed the national debt over 100 per cent. He loved the sugar rush of popularity that came with being a spender in a crisis, but afterwards reformed nothing, preferring instead to raise taxes, generally by copying Labour’s madder talking points. For example, putting up corporation (company profits) tax to 25 per cent, freezing personal allowances, and hitting the North Sea with a 75 per cent “temporary” windfall tax, that has already outlasted the short period of high prices that inspired it. The latter has mortally wounded domestic investment, ripe for the Labour administration to finish it off. An error made despite his predecessor Osborne making exactly the same mistake with the same disastrous consequences only a few years earlier.

He confused managerialism with competence, and triangulation with wisdom

In many respects Sunak has been both cipher and herald for all the worst instincts of his own side and the Labour government that has followed. If he seems comfortable with the King’s Speech perhaps it’s because he’s written large parts of it. Rejected by party members he achieved office on the whim of MPs following the debacle of mad bomber Lizzie blowing herself up lighting flares in the economic firework factory he and the Bank of England had bequeathed her. His sales pitch was that with “the sensibles” back in charge they could turn their fortunes around. He demonstrated instead that they could make it far worse.

He confused managerialism with competence, and triangulation with wisdom. He bought in a team made in part of retreads from 2017, where they had turned a near twenty-point polling lead and forecasts of a 140-180 seat majority into a hung Parliament and Government reliant on the DUP at a time of political crisis. In 2024, he tried to parachute many of them into safe seats which they then managed to make unsafe.

Compulsory national service, the “Sunak Squad” or “Sunak Youth” was the apex of this approach. It took a reasonable idea, boosting the army in a time of growing international insecurity, and turned it into a hateful assault on the freedom of youth wrapped in a tatty flag and a pathetic threat to deprive them of their phones if they refused to wipe bums for the NHS. It wasn’t discussed with colleagues, it wasn’t thought through or road-tested with the public, just thrown into a manifesto by self-important thirty-something teenagers in an echo of the “death tax”. 

What he is doing now, chilling with the Prime Minister, high-fiving his fellow tech-boy glo-bros, and in every respect oozing an unearned degree of self-satisfaction as a card-carrying member of the good chaps blob is no more admirable or wise than his various predecessor’s global self-pity tours. 

Certainly, his party would like him to be a unifying leader. But unifying them against a common foe as an Opposition, not continuing his agenda of back-slapping surrenders to socialism as he works out the fees for his future speaking tour. If the Conservative party continues with Sunakism — merely a vehicle for managerialism, a revolving door for the “uniparty”, a Manchester City to Labour’s Manchester United; it’s not going to survive the current realignment of politics.

The 2024 Reform and Liberal Democrat votes are protests, but they could easily firm up into sustainable coalitions that change the political landscape as has happened in France and the USA. Sunak in that regard has no useful contribution to make. He doesn’t get it, he’s checked out, and if he’s happy it’s because he’s reconciled to a wonderful future of well-paid influence without responsibility.