Rishi Sunak’s charm won’t save him if he is seen to fiddle while Britons’ pockets burn
Rishi Sunak is renowned at Westminster for his nice manners. One Conservative MP who lobbied the chancellor for a policy change, but came away empty-handed, says: “I have never been told to fuck off so politely.”
For a people-facing profession, politics is populated with many characters who have the people skills of a hippopotamus with toothache. In an environment where it is often absent, charm can take you a long way and it has been one of the key drivers of the sensationally swift ascent of the 41-year-old chancellor.
He looked close to reaching the very summit in the early part of this year when Number 10 was engulfed by the torrent of revelations about partygate. When asked whether he had confidence in Boris Johnson, some of his answers were studiedly ambiguous, he skipped a session of prime minister’s questions to put distance between them, and he publicly rebuked the next-door neighbour for attempting to use the crimes of Jimmy Savile to smear Sir Keir Starmer. When the Johnson premiership dangled by an extremely fragile thread, the chancellor was regarded as the man most likely to succeed by Conservative MPs, party members, pundits and voters.
There has been a radical change in the atmosphere over the past three weeks as a result of Russia’s vicious assault on Ukraine. Partygate has been effaced from the headlines by a conflict that has become the all-consuming focus of attention.
“The war is obviously grim, but it has helped Boris,” one Conservative MP told me recently. As he said this, his voice dropped to a mutter. He felt suitably sheepish to be sharing calculations about the Tory leadership when Ukrainian cities were being pounded into rubble. Yet, he is correct. Johnson loyalists and opponents alike think that
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