How is Rishi Sunak so bad at this? Having posed the question some months ago, it’s time to have a crack at answering it. The election campaign has left little dispute about his lack of political nous: from the rainswept announcement, to the D-Day evacuation, to the response to the gambling scandal, he has repeatedly led his party like a man who has simply not encountered democratic politics before. 

And at least part of the answer to the mystery of his ineptitude is that he hasn’t really. More than any prime minister of the last 50 years, Sunak has managed to reach the top without having to deal with the messy business of getting people to vote for him. Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair, David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson — they had all fought unwinnable seats for their parties and experienced the frustration of the opposition benches. 

Sunak, instead, is a zoo baby: selected in 2015 for Richmond, until the last couple of weeks one of the safest Conservative seats in the country. He entered parliament just as his party won its first majority in decades. Young, glamorous, rich, from an ethnic minority, it’s hardly surprising that Cameron saw him as the future of the Tory party. 

And this was merely the latest stop in a life that is remarkable for its happy path: Winchester, Oxford, Goldman Sachs, Stanford, marriage to an heiress, a hedge fund. Don’t take my word for it. By his own account the great hardship of his youth was a lack of satellite television. 

Sunak’s astonishing run of good fortune continued in parliament. Few of those in the Brexit trenches remember it as an easy period, but Sunak was far from the fighting: a loyal backbencher and junior minister, dutifully voting for whatever his party’s policy was that week. His decision to back leaving the EU but not make a fuss about it was hardly a bold one. It was simply the smart thing for an ambitious backbencher to do.

In fact it reflected the dominant theme of Sunak’s political career: from getting selected for Richmond to becoming prime minister, what has mattered has always been the internal politics of the Tory party. This month is the first time that he has been forced to appeal to anyone who wasn’t a party member. 

If tepidly backing Brexit in the referendum was his first characteristic decision, his second was to enthusiastically back Johnson for the party leadership in 2019. His article in The Times with Oliver Dowden and Robert Jenrick announcing that “Only Boris” could save the Conservatives was the moment the rest of us knew that the careerists had seen the future. Did they believe Johnson had the character to be prime minister? It hardly matters. They believed Johnson would win, and that supporting him could help them rise. He did, and it did. Sunak entered the Cabinet as Chief Secretary to the Treasury. Eight months later, he was Chancellor of the Exchequer, appointed because Dominic Cummings viewed him as more pliable than his predecessor Sajid Javid.

It’s tempting to ascribe such a meteoric rise to terrific talent. But aside from standing in at a 2019 debate when Johnson was hiding in a fridge somewhere, Sunak reached the second most powerful seat in the Cabinet without making a single notable contribution to British political life. 

More than that, the years from 2015 to 2022 were marked by the unusual absence from the stage of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition. The Jeremy Corbyn years and then the cross-party unity of Covid meant that Sunak managed to become Chancellor of the Exchequer — indeed, to spend most of his time in the role — without ever facing a tricky moment in Parliament. Can there have been a career like it? 

In 2022, he finally hit a bump in the road, as he was defeated by Liz Truss for the party leadership. Conservative members suspected him of being motivated more by careerism than conviction. His inability to win the support of actual nailed-on Tories was a clue that he might struggle with people who didn’t have membership cards in their wallets. But even here he was to enjoy a stroke of good fortune when she imploded, enabling him to become prime minister without having to persuade party members that this was a good idea. 

A happy life is hardly a character flaw, of course. We should all hope to be so blessed. But challenges build character. The Labour victory of 1997 was built by veterans of the 1983 defeat. Prime ministerial backgrounds often contain a childhood trauma or struggle — often parental death or illness — that helps to explain their driving ambition.

Never having had to persuade any electorate but a Conservative one, it is hardly a surprise that as prime minister Sunak prioritised Tory unity over establishing any distance between himself and his predecessors. A process-driven insider, he has spent recent days explaining that he needs the Gambling Commission to tell him whether he shared his election plans with his team. These are zoo baby errors.

Sunak has made things worse — much worse — with his inability to process the political defeats other politicians were used to as a matter of course

It would be a mistake to blame the coming 2024 Conservative defeat on Sunak alone. Most of the blame surely lies with the party’s flings with Brexit and Boris: the first a complicated policy problem that its MPs lacked the patience or wit to understand; the second a man obviously unfit for high office. 

But for those of us who are fans of narrative arcs, it is pleasing that Sunak was a supporter of both the decisions that now cause him so much trouble. Backing them may have been tactically smart for Sunak the ambitious MP, but they turn out to have been destructive for Sunak the PM.

Electoral defeat was coming anyway, but Sunak has made things worse — much worse — with his inability to process the political defeats other politicians were used to as a matter of course. Lacking any history of picking himself up, and dusting himself down, he simply didn’t understand he had made mistakes, let alone learn from them. Ill-served by a court of friends, his response to criticism is so snippy precisely because he was so uncomprehending. What will he make of this monumental defeat? Possibly less than we would imagine.