LONDON – He is the millionaire ex-chancellor who loves small states and sound money; the Brexit-voting former hedge fund boss who attended one of England’s most exclusive schools.
Yet in the frenzied race to replace Boris Johnson as UK Prime Minister, it is Rishi Sunak who now finds himself being painted as the high-tax, pro-EU candidate of the Tory left.
It’s been quite a journey for a man described just four months ago as a “Thatcherite in trainers” by the left-wing Guardian newspaper.
“Rishi blasts ‘socialist’ taxes,” screamed the front page of the right-wing Daily Mail last week, promoting an op-ed by Johnson’s loyal lieutenant Jacob Rees-Mogg. “Sunak has squandered the Conservative Party’s decades of effort to build a competitive tax regime,” Rees-Mogg warned.
“Liz Truss: I’ll back Sunak’s tax hike”, its sister paper the Mail on Sunday had splashed the previous weekend, celebrating the Foreign Secretary’s “true blue” campaign. Two days later, the front page of the Mail read ominously: “Trot – Bring me back or it’ll be Rishi.” It sounded like a warning to readers.
Many Tory MPs remain unconvinced by this Take Rishi campaign.
Sunak collected 118 votes from his peers in Tuesday’s fourth-round leadership vote, retaining his place as the favorite in the race and falling just two short of the 120 needed to secure a place in the final head-to-head.
But his hopes of actually winning that contest have been severely dented by a YouGov poll of Conservative Party members – the rank-and-file soldiers who will choose the winner from the final two candidates – which found he would be well beaten by either of his remaining opponents in the decisive direct vote.
This apparent disparity between the views of Tory MPs and mainstream party members is in part a reflection of successful efforts by enemies to undermine Johnson’s record after two and a half years as chancellor.
Opponents accused Sunak of raising taxes to socialist levels, a blasphemous charge in a party that idolized free marketeer Margaret Thatcher.
Sunak’s critics have repeatedly attacked his tenure at the Treasury Department, which coincided with the COVID-19 pandemic and thus the heaviest public borrowing since World War II. Sunak’s attempts to reduce the burden on public finances by increasing national insurance for workers and reversing business tax cuts further angered his enemies.
Conservative leadership candidate Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss during Britain’s Next Prime Minister: The ITV Debate at Riverside Studios in London, England | Jonathan Hordle/ITV via Getty Images
“Rishi, you’ve raised taxes to the highest level in 70 years,” Truss pointedly told him on Sunday night’s ITV shows. “It will not stimulate economic growth.”
“The ‘socialist’ label reflects the size of the tax burden, the size of the state and inflation,” added an unimpressed Tory aide.
It’s all about the EU
Incredibly, Sunak has also found himself vulnerable to right-wing attacks on Brexit, despite voting to leave in 2016. Some Brexiteers fear he will blink at the prospect of a damaging trade war with the EU if relations deteriorate further in the coming months .
In fact, Truss, a Remain vote now reinvented as a darling of the Tory right, is seen as a true believer in tax cuts and Brexit.
“[Truss] is the only candidate that will get [Brexit] Done. Everyone else will be run by the civil service and obey them,” Tory backbencher Marcus Fish told Nigel Farage on GB News this week.
Sunak’s supporters argue that they are relaxing this “angle of attack”.
“It’s not really advisable because it just serves to highlight that Truss didn’t support Brexit in the first place,” said one former Sunak-supporting political aide. “It forces him to come out and explain that he did it.”
Indeed, Sunak’s supporters were jubilant when the candidates were asked to raise their hands if they supported Brexit in a televised debate on Sunday.
“Trats was obviously desperate to get his hand up, but he couldn’t,” the former councilor said with delight.
Nevertheless, with their candidate falling in the party membership polls, Team Sunak felt obliged to counter-attack attempts to paint him as a soft-centred Tory.
Over the weekend, they released a tongue-in-cheek video titled Rishi and Brexit: A Brief History, explaining how he went against the advice of his superiors as a young MP campaigning to leave the EU. It prominently features an image of his rival Truss advertising the “I’m in” message, which was one of the slogans of the campaign to remain in the European Union.
And in an article for the pro-Brexit Sunday Telegraph, Sunak promised to rewrite previous EU laws that still “hinder” British business and outlined plans for a new Brexit minister and Brexit enforcement department if he wins.
No, you’re the socialist
Sunak also hit back at his economic record, calling the Trust’s own loan plans “socialism” during the ITV Concerts on Sunday night.
“He is not a socialist. This is absolute nonsense. He just believes in sound money. They are the ones planning to borrow money to spend on things we can’t afford,” said one senior backbench supporter of Sunak’s rivals.
“To call the Conservative candidate a ‘socialist’, at least in my generation, makes no sense at all. I think it’s a stain,” added the veteran former Tory MP. “The bigger influence is being a finance minister and looking at the books.”
Another Tory MP supporting Sunak believes many MPs are actually “very unhappy” about what the government has been “forced” to do to support the economy when the COVID-19 pandemic hits in 2020.
Few of those who branded Sunak a socialist raised objections at the time to the billions of pounds allocated to the leave scheme, the MP pointed out.
“I don’t remember people saying ‘let the businesses in my constituency go to the wall’. I don’t remember them saying “don’t help people on vacation,” the deputy added. “Of course government is big — we just had COVID.”
But the anti-Sunak political adviser quoted above insisted that the cost of COVID-19 was being used by the Treasury as “justification for something like a complete cut” from Johnson’s wider post-Brexit plans.
Rishi Sunak, Chancellor of the Exchequer, leaves to present the Annual Budget 2020 at Downing Street in London, England | Dan Kitwood/Getty Images
Will Tanner, director of the center-right think tank Onward, said indeed that Sunak’s campaign was “remarkable for the fact that he did not commit himself to an ideological position.”
“It was actually relatively centrist and established,” he added.
Torsten Bell, chief executive of the centre-left Resolution Foundation, said Sunak was “obviously not a socialist in any meaningful use of the word” but had fallen victim to the tension between “the fiscal conservatism element of conservatism and lower taxes element of conservatism.”
Revenge is sweet
Another dynamic clouds the picture surrounding Sunak – the manner of his departure from government.
His dramatic resignation earlier this month helped precipitate Johnson’s eventual downfall and came after months of what Johnson allies believed was a blatant leadership conspiracy.
“This is a fellow Conservative who has turned on the Prime Minister,” replied the hostile councilor quoted above, when asked about the charge against Sunak of “socialism”.
In fact, Sunak’s supporters believe that many of the attacks come from Johnson loyalists intent on revenge, fearing that their own ministerial careers may now be in jeopardy.
“There is a small cabal of people around Boris, a group of ministers who frankly wouldn’t be ministers in any other government. And they are about to get him,” said the senior backbencher quoted above.
But that doesn’t mean their efforts to rebrand him aren’t hurting his prospects of becoming prime minister.
“He’s clearly a lot better than the others,” said one supportive Tory strategist. “But he’s not where he needs to be with taxes. If the others don’t blow themselves up during the campaign – which they clearly could – then frankly I’m not sure he’s going to win.”
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