Whatever you think of him— and whatever he does — Rishi Sunak as Prime Minister is a boon for Global Britain
It matters. It matters.
“Not impressed if you voted for Sunak,” said my fellow party member (in early September).
“Well. I did actually.” I replied
“I think that while your Ms Truss displays a great talent for political positioning, during the campaign this has manifested as crowd-pleasing demagoguery, vaguely redolent of Trump, at the expense of restrained, considered statesmanship. Furthermore, although I admire her Thatcher-esque will for our country to thrive, I am unconvinced that her methods will bear fruit, and would rather the more grounded, albeit less inspiring, approach of Mr Sunak.”
Of course, I didn’t actually say any of that. I muttered something about being uncomfortable with landslide majorities, and so had voted for Sunak to ‘balance things out’.
“You’re a good comedian.” my friend said.
As it turned out, Sunak did not lose by anything like the margin expected, which itself gave me hope that the Conservative Party’s brush with Pollyanna-ish populism was at least not as braindead as Labour’s 2015 vintage (Truss won with 57.4%; Corbyn with 59.5%…but against three other candidates).
And I did like Truss’ Thatcher-esque gut rejection of British decline, her setting sights on the Holy Grail of Growth, her vision for the Commonwealth as an anti-CCP bulwark and her strong support for Ukraine. And wasn’t there a poetry in having a PM and a monarch with the same first name, if only for two days? And yes, the normally stilted Truss did do a good job reading the KJV at Her Late Majesty’s funeral. And well, yes, I always did like the cut of Kwasi Kwarteng’s jib. And doesn’t he sound convincing with this fiscal event? Now let’s just sit back and watch the…
Oh.
Eeyore always beats Pollyanna in the end.
Truth to be told, while I’d love to unleash a flight of ‘I told you so’ gifs upon more true-blue-believin’ fellow Tories, that wouldn’t be quite honest, and not just because by 5th September I was too jaded to bother voicing my concerns to my Trussite companion.
It’s because the main reason I voted for Sunak wasn’t for his economic credibility.
If I there was one reason why I voted for Sunak, it was the colour of his skin.
I know that’s shallow. I know that’s un-Conservative, as we take a dim view of identity politics. I know that compromises King’s dream of judging by the content of one’s character, not the colour of one’s skin.
Well, hopefully it’s clear that I do think Sunak has the better character than Truss…and if you’ve read my earlier work, you’ll know I deem it better than Boris’ too. But the skin colour was certainly a factor, and I’d seen Sunak as a future PM more or less since he first burst into our national consciousness along with ‘furlough’ in a great, warm, un-ideological bearhug.
It was not long after that that two great narrative assaults on the honour of our country came hurtling across the Atlantic. First, we had the terrifying mind-virus of BLM radicalism, that sought to tear down our great monuments, castigate even our purest moral achievements and subdue our national sentiment to the level of Germany’s. Then, the ludicrous but nonetheless influential innuendo from the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, which I shall not dignify with further comment.
Can you blame me for thinking even at the time that the ideal antidote to such nonsense was a viable but visibly non-white head of government?
Now that we have ended up with such a head of government — no matter the way — we can sit back and enjoy the fruits. I’ve written before about narratives and their disruptors, when a fact too large and apparent emerges to compromise or even destroy someone’s story about themselves, or — particularly — about others.
To start with a comparatively gentle example, President Biden — a man who knows the UK is his country’s most steadfast ally but can’t resist the occasional Hibernian dig at the Brits — just so happened to be addressing Indian-Americans at a Diwali event, when he welcomed the auspicious coincidence thus:
“As my brother would say ‘Go figure!’” [audience laughs] “And the Conservative Party!”
(Incidentally, Peter Beinart has interesting observations on the unlikelihood of an American equivalent to Sunak in today’s GOP, which provokes all sorts of further Ed West-type questions about the capacity of monarchies versus republics to bear creedal diversity among citizenries.)
More meaningful still were the reactions from India itself. “Everyone in India is excited about it!” a former housemate from Kerala told me, perhaps exaggerating ever so slightly. But no less a figure than Shashi Tharoor, more likely to be found making histrionic claims about the British Raj in recent years, tweeted praise for “the Brits” for doing “something very rare in the world” and suggested there was something for his country to learn from. Elsewhere he took it for granted — unlike many on the British left- that Sunak at №10 if proof of
“the fact that the British have outgrown their own centuries of racial discrimination which they practiced in their colonies during their Empire”
and is, he said, “a remarkable development”. He also highlighted Sunak’s overt Hinduism- never trumpeted but nor hidden — as “a very unusual thing for the Brits to overlook”. In a piece for The Quint he described Sunak’s achievement as
“even more breath-taking than Barack Obama’s ascent to the Presidency of the United States in 2008, since blacks have been a feature of the US political landscape and were far more visible in American politics way longer than Indians or Asians had been in Britain.”
If that reaction was the most strikingly honest, then the least so comes from the US again- or rather from that semi-detached island which seems to disavow all national allegiance, American progressivism. Proving that he hasn’t gotten any funnier since 2015 when I stopped watching The Daily Show, Trevor Noah took the opportunity to invent a ‘backlash’ from supposed racists in the UK — and Tucker Carlson for some reason.
I could sardonically demolish the thing, but it’s already been done by the professionals. For pure unflustered pushback in the comments section though, I salute Mr Tom Harwood and the legendary Andrew Sullivan.
But for the highest levels of narrative warfare, it takes a politician and the country itself roared back at Mr Noah through a tweet from former Chancellor Sajid Javid:
When Sunak’s spokeswoman was asked whether he thinks the UK is a racist country, she simply replied “No he doesn’t.”
But let’s leave all that knockabout stuff, and focus back on the positive; that is, the story itself. Because I was right. Whatever the politics, whether you think Rishi Sunak is a fire-breathing Osbornite itching to cut the NHS to oblivion or a crypto-socialist Brownite resigned to managed decline — or even a WEF drone in place to pin a wayward UK back in the globalist fold — his achievement in becoming the first British-Asian Hindu Prime Minister is a remarkable one, not just for him but our country. Whether the Trevor Noahs of this world will continue unaccountably bashing us for racism is moot, but it certainly enables a world of moving, classy statements like that of British diplomat Ajay Sharma: “When someone today was surprised that I was a British diplomat, I was able to say, I am a British Asian just like my Prime Minister @RishiSunak”
Sunak’s opposite number in the White House is also right. “It matters.” President Biden said, that a man named Rishi Sunak can become PM. “It matters.”
