With Sunak as UK PM, let’s hope for bland times ahead

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One is often advised to start with a joke. Or a quote from some respected writer, philosopher or something. But this latest development in British politics is so sad and bewildering that I can only think of seven immortal words uttered by Johnny Rotten.

“Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?” said Rotten.

I won’t go into the history of why and when Rotten — then the Sex Pistols singer — said that, but I will say he said it with a sneer. As was his wont. 

And I can’t shake the feeling that there were multitudes of sneering faces when Rishi Sunak walked into Number 10 Downing Street as the United Kingdom’s fifth prime minister in six years. As he turned and waved to the TV cameras, what did he see and what did he think?   

There would have been members of his own party, the Conservatives, known as the Tories at home, and the press pack outside Number 10, Sunak’s new — and I hasten to add, temporary — abode.

They would have been joking about the sort of dreams that Sunak would have when he finally rested his head on a prime ministerial pillow for the first time in a bed where, only a few nights ago, one imagines Liz Truss, now one of the shortest serving British leaders in history, tossed through sweaty, restless nights. 

And when Sunak woke for his first day in office, would he have wondered: “What have I done? Will it have been worth it when it’s all over?”

Because it might be over sooner than any of us care to think — or sneer about. 

A toxic tenure for Sunak

There’s a voice in my head that’s urging me to acknowledge Sunak being the first PM whose parents migrated to the UK from South Asia via Kenya and Tanzania. 

As such, Sunak came from relatively average beginnings to get where he is today — but then I challenge myself to define average.

Sunak attended Winchester College, an elite boarding school, and then studied the obligatory PPE. Alas not “personal protective equipment”, but the degree that all aspiring career politicians take: politics, philosophy and economics. Then he did an MBA at Stanford in the United States, joined an investment bank, made millions, married into billions and scored more of an upper-class accent (and lisp) than most of the rest of we migrant kids can ever hope for, let alone all the kids who grow up on the council estates, places to which the Tories are ever blind. 

You might like to congratulate Sunak on that — but just as many women would rather they weren’t referred to as “a female prime minister/ astronaut/ athlete/ head chef” but simply as “prime minister/ astronaut/ athlete/ head chef”, a guy like Sunak would rather be known as a chancellor who got the UK through the pandemic and then a PM who … who … sorry. No one is quite sure yet what Sunak must do.

But whatever it is, it’s not going to be easy. In fact, as I wrote when Liz Truss resigned, the job of running the UK right now, from within a political party and establishment as broken as the Tories, is as toxic as it gets.

Cheated on Sunak’s second go 

Back to those sneering faces in Downing Street, then. They know, as well as Sunak should know, if he’s even one iota more honest with himself than Truss ever was — as reports have led me to believe — we all know that he was chosen by default, thanks to a sense of fatigue inside his own party and the knowledge that “if we don’t prop up Sunak now, we really will get Boris Johnson, the poor man’s Churchill, back again. And who is Penny Mordaunt anyway?”  

No, no one actually said that. I’m just imagining the conversations that took place over the weekend when it became clear that two frontrunners in the race to be the next PM were Sunak — and Mordaunt, the leader of the House of Commons. 

Sunak lost to Truss, and because she did such a great job, the Tories handed the job to her runner-up. And these people are supposed to be some of the brightest, most entitled individuals in the country.

There’s one other person who knows all that too: Jeremy Hunt, the current chancellor of the exchequer.

Hunt will be laughing his head off. Because he knows, just as well as Sunak and the rest of the Conservative party know, that Sunak would now have to have a very, very, very good reason to roll back Hunt’s own rollback of the former chancellor’s economic plans. That’s Kwasi Kwarteng, who was replaced by Hunt a week ago, after his plans caused a market meltdown in the UK.

So, Sunak is in Number 10, while next door at Number 11 Downing Street, Hunt will be the one running the show — just as Sunak did when Johnson was prime minister. In that sense, Sunak has been cheated out of a fair go. And he’d have to know that. I just don’t know why he’d bother, aside from pure ambition.

It’s a sad, sorry situation. I may quip about their having done so many U-turns that they may still reverse Brexit. But, no, there will be none of that now. There will be no more flips or flops, U-turns or resignations. At least not if they know what’s good for the country.  

Sunak will see but one option ahead — and that is to let Hunt get on with his job, while he, Sunak, does his, which is to smile, talk platitudes and try to survive long enough to make it to the next planned general election, either in May 2024 or at the latest January 2025. 

So, let’s hope it’s bland times ahead, or the only remedy left will be for King Charles III to kick out all the fools in Downing Street and run the country himself.

This is an edited version of an article first published by Deutsche Welle.

Zulfikar Abbany, science editor and storyteller for Deutsche Welle, is fascinated by space, the mind, AI and how technology touches people.

The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Mail & Guardian.