Rishi Sunak: My Part In His Downfall

A Reform UK Candidate's Perspective on a Compliant Technocrat with a Talent for Making People Poorer

Everyone has their tipping point.

Mine came a good deal earlier than for most Reform UK candidates and voters. It was in late 2020 when, as Chancellor, Rishi Sunak - having proclaimed that nobody would be left behind when it came to lockdown support - went on to leave people behind.

About 3.5m people were let down. These were the “Excluded” and among them were newly self-employed and limited company directors that paid themselves through dividends. Interviewed by Martin Lewis on ITV, Sunak was asked about the latter, muttered something about a fraud risk and gave a thousand yard stare when Lewis asked if nothing could be done.

That stare was an epiphanic moment. For me, it was a glimpse into the soul of a man whose success was a result of not falling out with anyone. As Chancellor, he clearly realised that the Treasury and HMRC loathed the self-employed and limited company directors and were using the pandemic as an opportunity to extinguish them. He knew this, made the calculation that few were Tory voters - something he was caught saying out loud on video - and went along with it.

While many of the Excluded struggled to survive - with several dozen taking their own lives - Sunak’s furlough and Bounce-Back Loan schemes became the target of industrial levels of fraud, so much so that his Treasury Minister Lord Agnew resigned in protest.

It was against this backdrop that I stood for Reform UK for the first time. I secured around 2% of the vote in the May 2021 London Assembly Elections for the constituency of Brent & Harrow.

Sunak’s talent as a softly-spoken, intelligent and compliant technocrat made him the perfect successor to Liz Truss when the grown-ups took back control. His record as Treasurer was one of mostly abject compliance to the Blob, even when on an analytical level he realised that successive lockdowns were doing lasting damage to the economy and to the health of the population. Rather than resign on principle in the manner of Lord Frost - or even threaten to do so - he later proclaimed his resistance by claiming to have inserted one of his team into Number 10’s Zoom calls to keep him abreast of developments.

For anyone in doubt as to the scale of Sunak’s compliance, consider the ill-fated smoking ban, the brain-child of Chris Whitty, another softly-spoken technocrat. This was an illiberal big-state initiative that a Conservative government should not have touched with a barge-pole. Indeed, according to Liz Truss in her pre-election appearance on Christopher Hope’s podcast, Whitty had presented this wheeze to all Sunak’s recent predecessors. Only Sunak, adrift when it came to delivering any of his proclaimed objectives, took the bait. How did he reconcile himself to such an un-Tory authoritarian move? By reframing it as something for his daughters.

Standing outside Number 10 in the pouring rain, Sunak did his best to present his record as one of serial achievement, rounding off his unremarkable list with:

“:… and we will ensure that the next generation grows up smoke-free. “

Two days later, Sunak had to express his disappointment that the Tobacco and Vapes Bill would not be included in the legislation being rushed through ahead of Parliament’s imminent shut down. As with so much else, he was powerless to control or even influence the fate of a bill to which he had attached such personal importance.

I stood again on July 4th, this time in Ruislip, Pinner and Northwood against a backdrop of an incredible surge of support for Reform UK. Of course, this was in no small part due to Nigel Farage’s late entry but having been active in the party for over three years, I’ve seen a steady stream of new members, candidates and supporters join the fray, each having hit their own tipping point. The party’s ranks have been swelled by people appalled at the Tories’ record. Among them, Sunak has been Reform UK’s most effective recruiting sergeant.

Perhaps the most fitting epitaph for Rishi Sunak is that the smoking legislation that he saw as a part of his legacy was foiled by his own decision to call a snap election. History will not regard him as a great Prime Minister - perhaps he wasn’t even any good as a technocrat.