Rishi Sunak has presided over a historic defeat. What will his legacy be?

Ben Worthy

How will Rishi Sunak be remembered? One possibility, of course, is that he won’t be – joining a list of prime ministers who have faded into history, like Alec Douglas-Home or Andrew Bonar Law. 

Those prime ministers who are remembered are typically associated with one, at most two things. For Tony Blair, it is Iraq; David Cameron, austerity and Brexit; Theresa May, Brexit; and Boris Johnson Brexit and Covid parties. Even Margaret Thatcher, after 11 years in power, is remembered mainly for being a woman and the poll tax. Sunak is seemingly best known for being rich, but if he’s lucky he might be remembered for his plan to deport refugees to Rwanda and for leaving the D-Day celebrations early. 

If he is thought of, it will likely be as a prime minister who inherited a mess. When he took over, Sunak was the third prime minister of 2022 alone. His premiership will enter the history books as the brief interlude after the immorality of Johnson and the incompetence of Liz Truss. 

Perhaps those who defend Sunak will argue that he took power amid one of the largest shifts of voters from Conservative to Labour, and that he could have done nothing to prevent it. In this reading, Sunak was simply doomed. Like John Major after 1992, he may be best remembered as an end-of-an-era prime minister trapped in an inevitable downward spiral – the final closing chapter in 14 years of Conservative rule. 

But even judged on his own terms, Sunak will probably be seen as a leader who failed. Taking over a party and government whose support had haemorrhaged through a combination of partygate and Truss, he promised competence and that he would “unite our country, not with words, but with action”. He never managed to do so. An Ipsos poll from April found that of all the Tory leaders since 1978, he is least likely to be thought of as “being good in a crisis”. 

In his first speech on the steps of Downing Street, Sunak promised a government that would “have integrity, professionalism and accountability at every level”. Like his promises of competence, this commitment to integrity came to nothing. There has been a seemingly unending succession of lobbying and donor scandals, in which Sunak himself has been caught up. 

Despite the symbolism of being the first British Asian PM, Sunak also failed to stand up to the racism of one of his own donors, Frank Hester, even accepting another donation after Hester’s comments came to light.  However, in a heartfelt intervention in the last days of his premiership, he did tell broadcasters of his “hurt and anger” at his daughters having to hear candidates from Nigel Farage’s hard-right Reform party calling him a racial slur.

Does Sunak have any positive policy legacy? The late David Marquand, a political analyst and Labour MP, famously said that “success is the only criteria to judge prime ministers”. On that merit, Sunak has little to show. If Major’s was “the government that could do no right”, Sunak’s was perhaps the “government that didn’t do”. 

Sunak did not ‘stop the boats’ or send asylum seekers to Rwanda. This, his flagship policy, fractured his own voter coalition rather than Labour’s and gave Farage a boost. His government also failed to ever really tackle the whole range of problems, from spiralling NHS waiting lists to sewage being pumped into rivers and seas, that dominate headlines. The areas he performed worst in were those he had pledged to tackle with his five pledges. 

It may be that Sunak’s is also remembered as the government that cancelled. It cancelled HS2, before salting the earth around it, and tried to cancel Net Zero – an extraordinarily irresponsible act of vandalism based on a marginal win in a single by-election that was attributed to Labour’s climate policies. 

He was a prime minister who was dealt a bad hand and played it even worse. This is in part through a failure of leadership, and the public view of Sunak is of a leader who proved to be indecisive and incompetent, even more so since the election campaign began. This is partly because Sunak himself never quite decided what he was – a centrist technocrat or a Farage-style populist. Instead, he flitted bizarrely between the two. As journalist Marie Le Conte wrote in the i: “From the moment he became PM, he struggled with the discrepancy between his image – a pleasant, liberal, centre-right technocrat – and his actual beliefs, which were some way to the right of his appearance.”

Sunak’s reputation may stand on his defeat at his surprise July election. Labour achieved a landslide win, after six weeks that went terribly for Sunak. One senior Conservative called it “the worst campaign of their lifetime”. As Robert Ford pointed out, Sunak began the campaign with the worst leader approvals of any leader and nothing got better. It began with an ill-thought-through promise of national service, then a D-day dodging run home and ended with concerns that he would lose his own constituency. It’s too soon to say, but the impact of the defeat could yet be existential. Sunak could become not just an election loser, but a destroyer of the Conservative Party.

Reputations are, as we know, changeable. In the 1990s, Major was seen as failing and flailing, the face of a thousand grey caricatures. Even in the late 2000s, he was unknown – a friend at a pub quiz rang me to ask if Major had ever been prime minister. Now he is viewed as a wise, centrist statesman. Gordon Brown, too, once famously described as going from “Stalin to Mr Bean”, is now a champion of social justice. 

Sunak saw the moment of his greatness flicker, but failed to get things done or turn the tide. Whether Sunak was trapped in a doom loop, or was the author of his own misfortune, history has flowed against him.

Originally on Open Democracy here

[Image from Ben Golik, creative partner at Uncommon Creative Studio]