That Rishi Sunak’s sign-off today will be overshadowed by Labour’s first budget in fourteen years is probably fitting for a politician for whom relevance never came naturally.
Media commentary on the Conservatives lining up to succeed Sunak began almost immediately upon the ex-PM entering Downing Street in late 2022. On Saturday, these considerations culminate as the next Tory leader — after a months-long, protracted and often acrimonious contest — is finally declared.
Tellingly, both of Sunak’s possible successors, Kemi Badenoch and Robert Jenrick, complicated his ill-fated premiership — from inside and outside the government tent respectively. And over the past few months, they have worked as one to utterly excoriate his record. It makes Sunak’s defence of his legacy look all the more futile.
So, after weeks of straddling the liminal divide between frontline and backline politics, the ex-PM is now free to wander into the wilderness. After all, it is finally time to consider the former PM in the past tense. “What is the point of Rishi Sunak?”, Westminster once queried — now: “what was the point?”
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Today, Sunak becomes the first former prime minister and chancellor to respond to the budget since Jim Callaghan. The time between Callaghan’s last budget as Treasury chief (1967) and response as opposition leader (1979) was twelve years. Sunak, meanwhile, has taken just two years to jump from the Treasury to No 10 to LOTO. Such has been the cascading, psychodramatic pace of British politics in recent time.
But since July, as the pace of Westminster has inexorably slowed, we have been forced to watch Sunak’s political fossilisation in real time. The ex-PM’s pre-election contributions ever failed to puncture the swelling anticipation of defeat; post-election, his defeat, disastrously actualised, renders his contributions futile.
Still — and as is extremely relevant today, if any success can be attributed to Sunak’s stay in Downing Street, it is that he helped propel Labour into a corner on economic policy. Of course, the Conservatives’ election attacks didn’t land (remember £2,000 of Labour tax rises?). But perhaps Sunak was playing the long game — a feat seldom achieved in his otherwise vacillating premiership. According to reports, Sunak’s shadow cabinet colleagues have gifted him a signed copy of a pre-election Mail on Sunday front page which read: “Rishi warning: Starmer will wreck Britain in just 100 days”. Sunak’s grim prophecy, his colleagues reckon, has come to pass.
That wasn’t, however, the focus of the former PM’s questioning today.
Instead, we were treated to a Sunak “best of” as he questioned Keir Starmer on Yorkshire, cricket, artificial intelligence, Northern Ireland, security and multiculturalism in turn. It was a wholly light-hearted exchange that began with the prime minister paying tribute to his predecessor’s “hard work, commitment and decency” and ended with Starmer promising to arrange for his predecessor “to meet the relevant minister about the A66 that runs through his constituency.”
The former prime minister, of course, has won plaudits for his sudden statesmanship since the Conservatives’ election defeat. The question now is what the future — i.e the backbenches — holds for Sunak. He is, reportedly, committed to seeing through the rest of this five year parliament as the Conservative MP for Richmond and Northallerton. The ex-PM happens to hold the safest Tory seat in the country (majority, 12,185).
And, as an ex-prime minister, he is endowed with the ability to “intervene” at a moment of his choosing, typically, at the expense of his successor; (in Sunak’s case, that could be either his replacement as prime minister or Tory leader). In those moments perhaps, the Sunak might finally realise the relevance that so eluded him from 2022-2024 — Theresa May-esque.
We can, Sunak stressed today, expect him to stick around. He told MPs: “I’m happy to confirm reports that I will now be spending more time in the greatest place on Earth, where the scenery is indeed worthy of a movie set, and everyone is a character.”
“If anyone needs me, I will be in Yorkshire.”
Josh Self is Editor of Politics.co.uk, follow him on X/Twitter here.
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