Rishi Sunak is smartest of the Conservative leadership possibilities and is needed for tough times
Huge challenges await the next British PM and former chancellor Rishi Sunak is the leadership contender best equipped to meet them.
The question of who leads Britain must be urgently settled. A ruthless foreshortening of the Tory selection process is required.
Sir John Major has floated sensible proposals, and Lord (George) Young, a former Conservative chief whip and former leader of the House of Commons, has written to The Times with an ingenious proposal of his own.
Needs must when the Devil drives, and the Tories dare not flounder through the northern summer under a discredited prime minister in only notional control. So whom should they choose?
We columnists are not high priests of politics, we do not anoint or disqualify aspirants for party leadership, and we can only express personal opinions. Like you, we can only guess.
I did, though, get my last guess right, spending some seven years warning about Boris Johnson. The wreck of his premiership in the past week, and the dark shadow his failings now cast over his party’s reputation, have justified my worst premonitions. So perhaps this time too I may ask for at least a hearing. Here goes.
In battles for leadership there are no eternal verities, only horses for courses, and the course ahead requires the very highest intelligence, the most careful and conscientious intellect, deep experience of economic management, and a fastidious judgment in matters of public display and political noise, of which the electorate is now heartily sick.
Rishi Sunak therefore strikes me as so far ahead of the other contenders that the odds on his succeeding must shorten. After a nightmarish spell of noisy impropriety in Downing Street, only quiet decency can win the next leader a hearing from a public whose patience with display has snapped. The very last thing Britain needs now is another show-pony.
So I do warn about the curiously likeable Liz Truss. Nobody I know who knows or has worked with her is without affection for our present foreign secretary. But none of them would deny that she’s seriously weird.
In her favour are a certain brisk command, and a talent for snap judgment. Against her is her judgment itself: wonky, unstable and at times frankly bonkers. The libertarianism is genuine and deep. The Brexitish credentials (she was a fierce Remainer) are suspect. Impulsiveness could be her undoing, and there are troubling questions, as with Boris, about how much she actually knows. “Shallow” isn’t quite the right word, but her world view seems neither complex nor deep.
I think Truss would strike the public as (at first) remarkable, on second viewing irritating, on prolonged exposure a joke, and on reflection downright dangerous. As we sail into an economic storm we don’t need the politics of the circus ring. Truss would present an open goal to the just-reprieved Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer’s boring exactitude. With a queasy feeling of deja vu, colleagues leaning her way should picture being sent out on to the TV sofas to defend the latest baffling or idiotic thing their prime minister has just said.
Then could Jeremy Hunt – unflashy, hard-working, experienced, knowledgeable, middle-of-the-road and the man I happily voted for in preference to Johnson – be the answer? I ought to feel enthusiastic about this good, pleasant, moderate, capable man, who did hold the National Health Service together for years, and would never say anything cheap or do anything dishonourable. So why the doubt? Is there a limpness, a missing crack of the whip, an unwillingness to get to the root of things? I cannot say: I simply record it. Hunt would always be my second choice.
Nadhim Zahawi? Impressive, fluent. I chaired the Tory selection meeting for Stratford-on-Avon’s prospective parliamentary candidate. Zahawi deserved his win. An audience of elderly Tories who’d arrived knowing little of him were charmed and so was I, but even then I sensed something of the conjuror’s art. His heartwarming story about sitting on the Baghdad runway as a nine-year-old with his would-be emigrant family, praying the plane would take off, touched us all, though I cannot recall him mentioning that his family were not (to say the least) without means, which emigrated with them. Maybe that’s irrelevant, but …
To my question “if the government wanted a nuclear power station here, would you defy a three-line whip”, his answer – that nuclear reactors need vast quantities of seawater, and from Warwickshire it was some way to the beach – vastly amused the audience, but …
Clever, supple, quick-witted, smooth, but there’s something missing: the quality of earnestness, perhaps. Boris was capable at least of faking that.
I unreservedly like Sajid Javid – most people do – and would suppose a PM’s red boxes would hold no terrors for him: energetically and obviously capable. But the quality of evident command, that elusive thing we call “stature”, matters in a prime minister, especially in frightening times. I don’t think he has it.
Ideologically, the defence secretary Ben Wallace [who ruled himself out on Saturday] would be my kind of centrist. This Ukrainian war is a big break for an MP whom one parliamentary colleague described waspishly to me as “an excellent captain in the Scots Guard” (as Wallace once was). Good on the radio with bluff soldier-talk and a repertoire of military techno-jargon – seeking the bubble reputation/Even in the cannon’s mouth – Wallace’s appeal is well pitched to those Tory males whom Samuel Johnson described when he said that, “Every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier.”
I should welcome Wallace’s comradeship in the trench, and enjoy talking about it with him in the bar later, but when Treasury officials come in with papers, graphs and briefings about fiscal consolidations and a monetary-fiscal doom-loop, is Captain Ben the man to critique their analysis?
Others have already put their names forward, some estimable. And though Tom Tugendhat’s unlikely to get the job, his advice to whomever does will be worth listening to. But I’ve covered the more obvious finalists.
We are heading into very rough water – government will not be liked but must try to be respected. Brains, experience, honesty, decisiveness, hard work, personal decency and the ability to reassure: these are what we need to see.
Huge challenges need huge ability. Complex policymaking needs a superb presiding mind. Serious times need leadership that is utterly serious about itself and its duty. And a nation that has surfeited on froth, nonsense and deceit – what Sunak in his campaign video on Friday called “fairytales” – is hungry for honesty, ready to hear the truth.
I see two figures who could take this upon their shoulders, but Michael Gove isn’t standing. I know Rishi Sunak and his family only slightly, but my impression is clear and strong. He’s a good man, and he could do the job.
The Times
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