DOMINIC LAWSON: The Tory faithful may prefer Boris Johnson – but Rishi Sunak is the real Right-winger
So Rishi Sunak has won the contest of unfeasible comebacks. Boris Johnson has abandoned his own remarkable attempt to return to 10 Downing Street within months of being booted out by his own MPs.
But it is a scarcely less improbable —and in this case, successful — comeback for Rishi Sunak, now set to be Prime Minister. It was only last month that he was rejected by the Conservative Party’s membership in favour of Liz Truss.
When I saw the former Chancellor at his small parliamentary office last Tuesday, he was trying to come to terms with the speed with which everything had fallen apart for the woman who beat him to the top job only last month.
When it comes to the matter of lockdowns, it was Rishi Sunak who was, in the Cabinet, the most persistent in warning not to overdo it. His Eat Out To Help Out scheme was a manifestation of his desire to get the country back to normal life as soon as possible
And he still did not know whether he would fight afresh for an opportunity which he never imagined would come again, or at least definitely not this side of a General Election.
He certainly wasn’t taking an ‘I told you so’ attitude — even though he had predicted exactly what would happen if a Tory Government adopted what, during that leadership election, he denounced as ‘fairytale economics’.
He warned presciently that a policy of massive unfunded tax cuts would cause interest rates to spike upwards, to the great cost of mortgage holders.
Jibe
Truss and Sunak had competed for the accolade of the ‘true Thatcherite’ — always the key to the good opinion of Tory Party members. Misleadingly, Truss’s gender made her seem the more plausible candidate for that honour.
But as I reminded readers last week, my father Nigel Lawson, Thatcher’s tax-cutting Chancellor, warned in July how his 1988 Budget had done that only after the Government had eradicated the public sector borrowing requirement and insisted: ‘Sunak is the only candidate who understands Thatcherite economics.’
For his pains, Sunak was described by Jacob Rees-Mogg, during a Cabinet meeting after he had quit No 11, as ‘the late lamented socialist Chancellor’.
Yet the principal reason for Sunak’s resignation was that he could not support Boris Johnson’s determination to embark on a version of what later became Truss’s fiscally incontinent strategy. This was clear from his resignation statement: ‘Our people know that if something is too good to be true, then it’s not true.’
I discussed Rees-Mogg’s jibe with a Treasury official, who was incredulous: ‘Rishi is seriously Right-wing.’ And then he added: ‘More than Boris Johnson.’
Truss and Sunak had competed for the accolade of the ‘true Thatcherite’ — always the key to the good opinion of Tory Party members. Misleadingly, Truss’s gender made her seem the more plausible candidate for that honour
Yet it seems to be Conservative members on what might loosely be described as on the Right of the party who appear to regard Sunak as ‘unsound’ but see Boris Johnson as a man after their own hearts.
Doubtless there are many such members of the party now furious that Rishi Sunak has, in effect, been forced on them by the decision of the Parliamentary party, which overwhelmingly backed the ex-Chancellor.
When you look at the long-term records of the two men, this view among party members doesn’t make sense. While he was at Oxford University, Johnson dallied with the then fashionable SDP (the new Social Democratic Party of Roy Jenkins and Shirley Williams, who abandoned Labour partly in protest at its advocacy of quitting the European Community).
Sunak was a precocious Tory who, in the wake of Tony Blair’s triumph in the 1997 General Election, complained in The Wykehamist (the magazine of his public school, Winchester): ‘He revels in the label of patriot, but has plans for the possible break-up of the United Kingdom and membership of an eventual European Superstate.’
As I reminded readers last week, my father Nigel Lawson, Thatcher’s tax-cutting Chancellor, warned in July how his 1988 Budget had done that only after the Government had eradicated the public sector borrowing requirement and insisted: ‘Sunak is the only candidate who understands Thatcherite economics’
Sunak’s decision to campaign for Brexit as an MP was therefore entirely consistent with his long-held euroscepticism. And I noticed, while in his office last week, that prominent on one of its walls was a framed front page headline of a pro-Brexit newspaper from the first day of the referendum campaign: ‘Beleave in Britain’.
Sunak’s pioneering of the furlough scheme is one reason given by some in the party for regarding him as a socialist in Tory clothing.
Well, under Donald Trump the U.S. embarked on a far more costly scheme to protect the incomes of working people during the economic havoc caused by the first wave of Covid 19, and I don’t hear anyone describing The Donald as a leftie.
Lockdowns
When it comes to the matter of lockdowns, it was Rishi Sunak who was, in the Cabinet, the most persistent in warning not to overdo it. His Eat Out To Help Out scheme was a manifestation of his desire to get the country back to normal life as soon as possible. He declared that everyone ‘must learn to live with it and live without fear’.
And it was Sunak who broke off a long-delayed family holiday in December 2021, and flew 5,000 miles back from California, when he heard that Boris Johnson was set to impose a second Christmas lockdown.
This was after the outbreak of the Omicron variant, a much more transmissible form of the virus than any yet seen. The Government’s medical advisers were warning of the need to introduce another wave of mandatory restrictions on social life, and Johnson was leaning towards their view.
Sunak, as The Mail on Sunday reported a month later, ‘went straight [from the airport] to Number 10 to see the Prime Minister, who … was preparing to use a press conference that weekend to impose new restrictions on social interactions.
So, in the light of all these areas where Sunak appears to be more to the Right on the most pressing issues, why is it that many Tory Party members who would share his policy approach instead seem to think Boris Johnson more their sort of politician?
Sunak insisted that the data did not justify such draconian action. This was because he observed that the data from South Africa, where Omicron began, showed the mortality rate to be much lower than from previous variants.
This point hadn’t been taken in by Boris Johnson, whose many talents do not include a forensic attention to detail — the polar opposite of Sunak.
In this context, it is unsurprising that Lord (David) Frost, who supported the then Chancellor in that Cabinet debate on whether to reimpose Covid restrictions, last week backed Sunak and not Johnson.
Then there is the matter of net-zero carbon emissions and the speed with which the UK should ‘go Green’. While Boris Johnson was gung-ho for this — declaring that the UK would become ‘the Saudi Arabia of wind power’, Rishi Sunak was much less so. Indeed, after his last Tory Conference speech as Chancellor, as the Politico website observed: ‘He failed to mention climate once.’
Shameful
More recently, Sunak has advocated the removal of the moratorium on onshore gas exploration and production (‘fracking’). Whereas Johnson, in his final week as PM, before Liz Truss took over, pointedly criticised such a liberalisation: ‘Tell everyone who thinks … we should get fracking and all that: offshore wind is entirely Green and clean.’
So, in the light of all these areas where Sunak appears to be more to the Right on the most pressing issues, why is it that many Tory Party members who would share his policy approach instead seem to think Boris Johnson more their sort of politician?
Perhaps a clue came over the weekend on Sangita Myska’s LBC radio phone-in show. A man called Jerry, from Lowestoft, who claimed to be a Conservative Party member and the son of a former constituency party chairman, said he would ‘vote for Boris’ in any party ballot and added: ‘Rishi’s not going to win it. Rishi is not even British…He doesn’t love England like Boris does.’
Pressed by Ms Myska that Rishi Sunak was born and educated in this country, Jerry wasn’t having it: ‘Having a British passport doesn’t mean you are a true British patriot . . . 85 per cent of the English are white English people and they want a Prime Minister that reflects them.’
Your standard racist, in other words.
We don’t know if ‘Jerry’ from Lowestoft is, as he claimed, a Conservative Party member. But when I asked a friend who is a member and voted for Sunak in the last leadership election, he said he thought that ‘around 10 per cent’ of the membership might ‘be biased against Sunak’ on such grounds, even if they would never express it publicly.
The idea that Sunak may be Right enough, but not white enough, for some party members, is shameful.
Thank goodness it never came to that.
Source: Read Full Article
