Conservatives in the U.K., especially Rishi Sunak, contributed to their own failure. But we should hope that doesn’t last too long.
Conservatives in the U.K., especially Rishi Sunak, contributed to their own failure. But we should hope that doesn’t last too long.
W hile Americans celebrated Independence Day, British voters went to the polls in a snap election called by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak. The timing came as a surprise to most, including his own MPs, as Sunak was widely expected to hold out on calling an election until the fall (the deadline being late January). Having trailed in the polls by over 16–20 percent ever since he took over as prime minister in October 2022, Sunak apparently decided to jump before he was pushed, choosing to end his rather mediocre run as prime minister on his own terms.
The election was never going to end in anything other than a Labour victory, but the scale of the loss is truly dramatic. Having won a comfortable majority of 365 seats (out of 650) in 2019, the party has now been reduced to just 121 seats, the worst performance ever in the party’s 190-year history.
Much of the blame for this must be placed on Sunak, a man with whom most Americans are probably unfamiliar. Despite not having suffered any major scandals, and despite having been rather popular back when he was a member of Boris Johnson’s government, Sunak’s approach to government proved ineffective. The story of Sunak is the story of an anti-rebel without a cause, a metaphorical dog who caught the populist car, but who had no idea where he was going to steer it afterward. His — and his party’s — fate should serve as a warning to center-right Americans hoping to wrestle back control from the populist right.
How Did We Get Here?
In December 2019, the Tories, led by Johnson, won an astonishing majority. Johnson campaigned on getting Brexit done, whereas the Labour Party campaigned on re-running the referendum and going back to the negotiating table. The Brexit-weary public overwhelmingly preferred Johnson’s “get it over with” approach. Johnson’s folksy demeanor and promises of unprecedented government investment to “level up” the forgotten North England region also allowed him to make inroads and win seats that had belonged to Labour for generations.
During the pandemic, the Tories rode high in the polls as Johnson rallied the country. Generous stimulus programs and a vaccine rollout that was the envy of the world carried the party even as the first signs of inflation began to appear. The ship would not begin to leak until December 2021, when reports appeared saying that social events had taken place during the pandemic in the government headquarters, contrary to the rules at the time banning all such events. Like Watergate, the initial reports were not too bad. Yet, unbeknownst to everyone at the time, the Tories had just hit the iceberg that would take down the ship. Unbeknownst to everyone, except to at least one person.
Sunak, then secretary of the treasury, would go on to register his campaign website domain in December, just weeks after the scandal broke. Sunak may not have leaked the story to the press, but having been present in the government HQ during the pandemic, and having attended at least one lockdown-breaking event, he knew that more revelations were soon to follow, revelations that would force Johnson to resign and create a vacancy for the role as leader of the Tories and prime minister of the United Kingdom.
Sunak waited patiently for Johnson’s popularity to collapse. Then, in early July 2022, he orchestrated a coup that saw dozens of members of Johnson’s government, beginning with Sunak himself, resign en masse over the course of a single day. His position now untenable, Johnson was finally forced to go. At this point, the Tories were trailing Labour by five to ten percentage points in the polls.
As treasury secretary while handing out stimulus money left and right, Sunak had been popular with voters in and outside his party. At the end of 2020, he was the most popular politician in the country. As he would find out in the Tory leadership election, however, those days were long gone. Having recently raised taxes to pay for pandemic spending, Sunak found himself on the defensive, having to fend off accusations that he had betrayed both conservatism and his former boss Johnson. In the end, party members overwhelmingly opted for Liz Truss, who had stayed loyal to Johnson until the bitter end but who ran on an aggressive, Thatcherite platform very different from Johnson’s. Truss’s main concern was cutting taxes and crushing the unions whose strikes were paralyzing the country just as they had back when Thatcher first took office in the late 1970s.
Truss would, of course, go on to serve fewer than 50 days as prime minister. Her budget proposal and the subsequent chaos have become the stuff of modern-day legends.
Yet, while Truss did herself no favors, her premiership would almost certainly have survived had it not been for the machinations of Sunak. Apparently unable to accept his defeat, Sunak’s allies in parliament publicly declared their intention to vote down Truss’s budget bill. This was absolutely unheard of: Any MP unwilling to support their party’s budget would be expected to leave the party or face expulsion. For scores of MPs to rebel against their newly elected leader who was presenting a budget proposal in line with the one she had just been elected on was even more absurd. The political chaos worsened the market instability caused by the rushed budget.
With Truss’s resignation, Sunak succeeded in forcing out a second prime minister of his own party within a few months. After this, Sunak was elected unopposed, with no input from party members. There is, however, a reason why the man who wields the dagger never wears the crown. By wielding the dagger against first Johnson and then Truss, Sunak alienated both the working class and Thatcherite supporters in his party.
Sunak’s Fumbles
Despite these troubled circumstances, Sunak’s ascension to premiership was nonetheless a victory for the moderate wing of the Tory party. After the boorish populism of Johnson and the radical footnote that was Truss, the grownups were finally back in charge. The problem was that they had no idea what a grown-up, center-right solution to Britain’s problems looked like.
Whereas Truss was happy to confront the unions and the civil service, and Johnson was happy to increase government spending as much as necessary to keep voters happy, Sunak was too cautious to do the former and too sensible to do the latter. On inflation, Sunak’s policy consisted mostly of not rocking the boat and hoping inflation would come down on its own. Johnson may have provided government handouts to keep voters happy, whereas Truss would have carried out radical supply-side reforms to address the underlying problem. Sunak chose “none of the above,” and when inflation proved to be less transitory than was initially thought, this approach proved to be a mistake. Meanwhile, tax levels are the highest they have been since record-keeping began 70 years ago.
On health care, one of the top three issues of voters according to polls, Sunak’s indecisiveness in the face of paralyzing strikes also contributed to his downfall. Johnson might have conceded to the doctors’ and nurses’ demands for higher pay and used deficit spending to finance it, whereas Truss would no doubt have emulated her hero Margaret Thatcher and actively undermined the strikes by offering no concessions while actively encouraging strikebreaking. While the latter is greatly preferable, either would have worked better than Sunak’s middle-of-the-road approach. Being a former chancellor, the equivalent of a secretary of the treasury, he could not find it in himself to give in to the unions and risk chronic deficits from exploding public-sector pay. Yet, he also lacked the courage and decisiveness to seek a head-on confrontation with the unions.
On immigration, Sunak fumbled it even worse. Despite immigration’s being one of the key reasons the British voted for Brexit, migration has actually spiked since the U.K. left the European Union. Boats cross the English Channel from France on a daily basis, with 30,000 asylum seekers making the trip in 2023, a number that will, by all accounts, be higher this year. As they are now outside the EU, the U.K. has no way of forcing France to take back asylum seekers (EU rules stipulate that asylum seekers generally must apply in the member state where they first arrive).
To deter these economic migrants, Sunak attempted to deport asylum seekers to the African nation of Rwanda while their claims were being processed. A deal with Rwanda was made during the Johnson administration, but the flights were postponed again and again as the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) intervened to delay them.
Within the Tories, some moderate elements wanted to abandon the Rwanda plan. Others wanted to leave the ECHR jurisdiction. Sunak decided on a worst-of-both-worlds approach: He insisted that the Rwanda plan was the only way forward, but at the same time, he refused to leave the ECHR. The opposition from the British courts and civil service, which have dragged their feet even after all the necessary legislation was put into place, has also been solid. Even as conservatives across Britain begged for a showdown with the bureaucrats, Sunak instead put his trust in the system. The flights to Rwanda never took off.
Finally, on crime, another traditionally strong topic for conservatives, the Tories again have little to show after 14 years in power. After savage cuts to policing during the austerity years of the early 2010s, police officer numbers have even now only partially recovered. This may help explain why British police are struggling to contain violent protests, stop antisemitic hate crimes, and why firearms- and other weapon-related offenses have increased. At the same time, a progressive institutional takeover of the legal system has led to police arresting citizens over politically incorrect tweets. When Suella Braverman, a member of Sunak’s cabinet and potential future party leader, called out the police’s inefficiency, Sunak summarily fired her. To be clear, Sunak is not a progressive. His problem is that, while he rejected the populist approach, he had few if any practical solutions of his own to offer, and certainly not any that could be implemented and yield results within a reasonable time frame.
Millions of disillusioned voters understandably asked themselves what the point of a conservative government is if it is unable to secure the borders or the streets and leave ordinary people with more money in their pockets. The election results should be understood not so much as a rejection of conservative policies but rather as a rejection of a government that failed to carry out conservative policies.
That Sunak called an election without first consulting with his party further contributed to the disaster. His decision to leave early during D-Day commemorations became a talking point for well over a week, and though he would later put in some good debate performances, these happened at a point when voters had, by and large, made up their minds. His disaster of a campaign also allowed the Reform Party, led by Nigel Farage who unexpectedly returned to British politics after the election was announced, to split the right-wing vote as traditional Tory voters searched for an alternative. Astonishingly, Labour’s 412 seats were won with a share of the vote less than 2 percentage points higher than they received in 2019 when they won a mere 202 seats.
What Happens Next?
Sunak clearly spent years plotting his ascent. Had he spent more time thinking of how he would approach the problems plaguing his country once he ascended to power, his legacy may have been different. For moderate elements in the U.S., not least in the Republican Party, this poses a serious question: What does a center-right solution to the chaos at the border look like? How do we fight the rise in violent crime? We can all agree that Trump’s protectionist approach to the economy is wrong, but what does the alternative look like? Not only are policy proposals needed, but these proposals need to yield positive, noticeable change within a reasonable electoral time frame (i.e., two to four years). Sunak’s approach of winning first and making up policy later ended up costing both him and the Tories any chance they had of another term in government.
As for Keir Starmer, despite his Tony Blair–style majority, his mandate is far weaker. Few credit Starmer for this upcoming victory, including within his own party. While Starmer was able to silence far-left critics within his own party loyal to his predecessor, the socialist Jeremy Corbyn (whom Starmer expelled from the party), these far-left critics fared very well in Thursday’s elections, with voters, not least in many Muslim areas choosing to elect independent, “anti-Zionist” candidates over the more moderate, Starmer-approved Labour candidates. With the U.K.’s foreign-born population being an important component of Labour’s core voters, this development could prove to be the beginning of a serious headache for Starmer down the line. Meanwhile, Starmer repeatedly refused to entertain rejoining the EU, despite his own pro-EU stance, stating just days before the election that he did not see Britain rejoining in his lifetime. This again puts him on a collision course with another of the party’s core voter segments.
What relations may look like with the U.S. under Starmer’s premiership is difficult to say: Starmer is a practical man, not an ideological Marxist like his predecessor, and he is reportedly “infatuated” with Joe Biden. Should the latter be reelected, one can expect a relationship not too different from the one Bill Clinton had with Tony Blair. Should, on the other hand, Trump win in November, Starmer will face extraordinary pressure from within his own party to pick fights and not be a toady like Blair was perceived to be to Bush during the later years of his premiership, something that cost him his legacy with British voters.
In summary, the lesson from Sunak’s failure is that if you wish to take a party back from populists, you have to have alternative ideas that still effectively address the problems that made your voters choose the populists in the first place. Just being a “normal politician” and “the grown-up in the room,” as Sunak loves to portray himself, simply is not enough. Political gamesmanship and cold-blooded knife-wielding may be enough to topple one or two populist leaders, as Sunak can attest, but the real challenge is what comes after that. In the end, it appears that, though unwittingly, Sunak may have burned down his party only to find himself king of the ashes. Policy-makers on both sides of the Atlantic ought to take note of his fate.
Sunak has now resigned both as prime minister and as leader of the Conservative Party. Some voices are calling for Nigel Farage to merge his Reform Party (who won five seats with 14 percent of the vote) with the Conservatives, with Farage taking over as leader. This would be a serious mistake, first due to Farage’s persistent unpopularity with independent, centrist voters, and second due to his views on Russia, which place him outside the U.K. political mainstream. I personally believe Kemi Badenoch, a Thatcherite conservative currently serving as the secretary of state for business and trade, would be the best choice.
The Tories face multiple challenges: providing a strong and credible opposition to Starmer over the next five years and winning back Reform voters while at the same time convincing centrist and low-information voters to give them another look. This is a monumental task that will require the party to unite behind a leader and give that leader time to rebuild. While Rishi Sunak and his party may have deserved this loss, we should hope, both for the United Kingdom and for the West as a whole, that the country may soon again enjoy conservative leadership.