As the youngest UK prime minister in two centuries and the first British Asian on the job, Rishi Sunak is assured of a place in history books. Thanks to the self-destruction of Boris Johnson and unprecedented brevity of Liz Truss's leadership, he has had a low bar to step over to project himself as a “normal boring” politician. Whether he can hang on to office at the next election is another question altogether.
Recent opinion polls give Labour a big enough lead to make it plausible it could overturn the Conservatives' big 80-seat majority in one go. This seemed impossible when Boris Johnson won the 2019 election and Labour was left with its lowest number of MPs since the 1930s.
Opposition leader Sir Keir Starmer is not taking anything for granted, Labour has been burned by poll leads before and the anti-Tory vote is split multiple ways. Sunak knows, however, that while Labour isn't counting any chickens before they hatch, the government is seeing all its chickens coming home to roost.
Since 2010, both income and wealth inequality have massively escalated in the UK for the benefit of a relative minority. Millions of workers have not had any real term pay increases for over a decade and the number of people in full time work but unable to pay for essential food and heating and reliant on charitable food banks has risen to crisis levels.
For Sunak, the high achieving banker and hedge fund plutocrat married into even greater wealth, this is not the best of optics; the inspiring story of his immigrant parents, a doctor and a pharmacist earning enough money to send him to one of England's most expensive boarding schools, can only go so far.
Under David Cameron and all four of his Conservative successors as PM, the government has loudly talked of austerity to justify spending cuts and hold down pay rises in the public sector, while simultaneously finding multiple ways to spend tax-payer money to transfer wealth to the rich. The latter means that, even before unexpected calls on government coffers like the pandemic, national debt was growing at record levels. It is now three times its size when the Conservatives ousted Labour 12 years ago, with interest payments multiplying accordingly to those able to invest in lending cash to the state.
Misfortune or mismanagement? Incompetence or intention? Global trends or class warfare? There are always many ways to look at the same set of facts. What is undeniable though is that, this year the UK is experiencing more worker discontent and strikes than it has for decades, across many sectors including nurses and railway workers. Even before this wave, a public mood that the fabric and functioning of Britain's society and many of its institutions feels broken, had clearly been growing for years. The food and energy price inflation of the past year has merely hastened the tipping point.
Rishi Sunak has become leader just as it seems everything everywhere in Britain has gone all wrong.
On the plus side for him, there are still two years left to call an election and the polls can't go much lower. His party can also usually count upon one-third of voters to always be Conservative and has numerous stalwarts among the right wing dominated British press.
The play-book for this winter of discontent is hence likely to be very familiar. There is already a lot of talk about having to make difficult decisions like “reforming” the NHS and fighting union militancy to appeal to the deep right wing of his party. These will be backed by a few grand gestures like bringing in the army to help break strikes and no doubt plenty of meaningless ones, like introducing new laws to outlaw strikes.
Friendly media can also be relied on to orchestrate hysteria about “illegal asylum seekers” or whip up a tabloid war on “woke” -- music to the ears of current Home Secretary Suella Braverman, who relishes her role as striving to be a caricature of her deeply right-wing predecessor Priti Patel.
Like Sunak, the parents of Patel and Braverman have roots in the Indian communities of British East Africa, a group whose rights to British citizenship were protected by Conservative Prime Minister Edward Heath in the early 1970s.
It is startling to note that, over the last 50 years, while the UK population has progressively become much more ethnically, religiously, and culturally mixed including in the Conservative party, that the type of xenophobic and racist language for which Heath sacked Enoch Powell from his shadow cabinet in 1968, has paradoxically become prevalent in mainstream discourse and is proclaimed by people who benefited as children from Heath's principled actions.
Plenty of material here for future psychologists and history PhDs, I think.
In ordinary times, with a friendly media and some luck, Sunak would still have many months to win some high-profile battles and be predicted to keep the Conservatives as the biggest party, even if it means playing Scrooge with nurses ahead of Christmas. But these are not ordinary times.
A growing proportion of people want a fundamental shift in policy to address the backdrop of growing poverty and creaking public services. If Sunak fails to win the next election, his term as prime minister will be shorter than those of either Boris Johnson or Theresa May. He may well end up rueing the day he achieved his greatest ambition as ten years too soon.
Niaz Alam is London Bureau Chief of the Dhaka Tribune.
