Since we are a nation burdened by an ever-growing number of ex-Prime Ministers, it is appropriate to praise them when their behaviour is honourable, if only to set an example for aar Andeh once Labour MPs and voters grow bored of the ‘whooooooooo remembers proper buses?’ shtick.
Compare and contrast. Liz Truss, ejected by an appalled electorate, enriching herself by touring the world on a one-woman self-delusion roadshow; Keir Starmer, who, on the morning of his successor’s first Prime Minister’s Questions, announced that he was cutting and running, breaking his promise to remain on as the MP for Holborn and St Pancras; and Rishi Sunak, who, after leading the Conservatives to our most catastrophic defeat in our history, has just been readopted as the Tory candidate for Richmond and Northallerton. This will make him the first former prime minister to stand again at an election after the one they lost since James Callaghan in 1983.
I’m not surprised. I bumped into Sunak last year at a horse race in his constituency, introduced by a lugubrious local councillor. We had met a couple of times previously, but he was a delight, and more than happy to spend a few minutes chatting about cricket and pose for a selfie while I cradled my sixth pint. But I couldn’t monopolise his time for too long since he was mobbed by locals. Sunak was clearly enormously popular. For all his opponents’ attempts to paint him as a deracinated member of the internal elite, a member of the Goldman Sachs class with £300 coffee cups and a Peloton addiction, one glance at his Instagram suggests he is a born-again Yorkshireman.
Sunak loves his constituency: visiting fetes and care homes, involving local school children with his maths charity, campaigning against Net Zero eyesores and in defence of local farmers alienated and ignored by Labour. Only this week he was up in the Commons asking about car parking at Northallerton station. He is a model MP. Yes he might be combining serving the good people of North Yorkshire with advisory roles for Goldman, Microsoft and Anthropic, fellowships at Oxford and Stanford and a column in the Sunday Times. But he’s still turning up to hand out the prize for the biggest marrow at the Wensleydale Show.
This only makes Starmer’s skedaddling all the more contemptible. While Starmer was Leader of the Opposition, suggesting that Sunak would soon be jetting off to California was the closest that slab of bland, adenoidal inadequacy could come to making a joke. Yet it is now Starmer who has decided that dutifully serving the people of Holborn and St Pancras is too mundane for him, who dreams – reports suggest – of one day taking over Nato. That’s a level of absurdity to match even that of Truss: someone who does spend a lot of time across the pond, on the basis that there are a few Maga headbangers left who haven’t clocked how toxic she is.
Perhaps ironically for a man not famously blessed in the height department, Sunak looks like a giant compared to his predecessor and successor. I’ve had the misfortune of meeting quite a few MPs. Sunak is far more intelligent, hard working and eloquent than most. His rapid rise was partially a consequence of the paucity of talent around him. Sunak arrived in Downing Street on the stickiest of wickets, after partygate and the Truss implosion, reviled and distrusted by some of his backbenchers, confronting an unsympathetic country counting down the days until they could kick the bastard Tories out. But as slim as his chances of success were, he still ploughed on, out of duty.
Sunak was unable to stop the boats, provide much of a reason why the Tories deserved another five years in power or convince voters Labour would be worse. Yet his warnings about the horrors of Starmerism were soon vindicated; by the time he stepped down for Kemi Badenoch, the Conservatives were ahead of Labour in the polls, a position we were unable to maintain. But if my party does ever get back into power, a return for Sunak would be a marvellous idea. He brought back David Cameron. A similar posting to the Foreign Office – or as some yet undefined ‘AI Tsar’ – would seem more than fitting, if he could tear himself away from the vegetables of Wensleydale.
Moreover, Sunak is only 46. Badenoch won’t be around forever. If Joe Root can come back, older and wiser, there is no reason why Sunak can’t. If the voters of Richmond and Northallerton can learn to love him, the rest of Britain may yet come to realise that they didn’t know when they were well off.
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