Tom Rachman is a contributing columnist for The Globe and Mail.
Suspense, Alfred Hitchcock said, is when you realize something awful will happen, and you can’t stop it. When the villain thuds up the stairs, for instance, but your leg is broken, and you can’t run. You’re frantic, unable to escape.
That has been life in Britain lately, where you dread what’s coming, and are powerless to stop it – from the predictable disaster of Brexit, to a National Health Service that keeps crumbling more each year, to the political leaders you don’t want but who keep taking office.
Thankfully, the villain thudding upstairs this time – Boris Johnson, hoping to regain power – was vanquished. Instead, the governing Conservative Party picked someone serious and informed for a change.
But Britain can’t exhale. Although Rishi Sunak – the third Tory prime minister within two months – pledges stability, he faces a public that is enraged and fearful. If Mr. Sunak gets this wrong, unrest could follow.
A slim man in a tight suit, the 42-year-old former financier rose to prominence as Mr. Johnson’s cabinet minister in charge of the economy. Mr. Sunak’s earnestness and smarts (traits not apparent in many on Mr. Johnson’s team) boosted his popularity.
But ultimately, the man nicknamed “Dishy Rishi” (a “dish” being slang for someone so attractive you’d devour them) quit over his disapproval for Mr. Johnson; Mr. Sunak hoped for the top office himself. But his main opponent in the summer leadership contest, Liz Truss, promised what a powerful faction of Brexiteers had longed for: tax cuts for the richest, purportedly to help the economy.
Instead, she crashed the economy, and her reign ended in record time, announcing her resignation after 44 days in office.
Mr. Sunak had warned of such a crash, so was vindicated. Now, he must deal with the damage, likely introducing every politician’s most hated combo: higher taxes with spending cuts.
It’s always hard to push through such painful measures. But it’s far harder when the public never picked you in a general election. As happened with Ms. Truss, only the Conservative Party got to choose Mr. Sunak.
“Locked away in their private club, the Conservatives have completely lost touch,” the founder of opinion research agency Public First, James Frayne, wrote this week, citing focus groups on how furious people are. If general elections do not come, he predicted, Britain could experience a rise in extremism, and the serious risk of public disorder.
“Politically and morally, you cannot spring brutal austerity on hard-pressed families as a result of your own stupidity without seeking their consent,” he said. “Not without making them angrier than ever before.”
Mr. Sunak’s fortunes will also be affected by his fortune. He’s a man of vast wealth, having married a daughter of the multi-billionaire founder of Infosys. At a time when people are struggling to pay for heating, to feed their kids before school, to avoid losing their homes, he owns a manor built in the 1820s, and a penthouse in Santa Monica, as well as homes in London’s poshest neighbourhoods.
Awkward videos circulate, too. In one, he speaks at a Tory event in the wealthy town of Tunbridge Wells, lamenting that public funding has gone to “deprived urban areas,” and promising to divert money instead to this affluent area. A second video hails from years ago, when the 21-year-old Mr. Sunak was filmed for a BBC documentary, boasting, “I have friends who are aristocrats, I have friends who are upper class, I have friends who are working class” – then, correcting himself, “but, well, not working class.”
But in a crisis, what matters is whether he can do the job.
In this, he faces another obstacle within his own party, from the Brexiteer nutbars who hunger for ever more extreme extrapolations of that disastrous policy. Already, Brexit (which Mr. Sunak campaigned for) is costing the country billions in lost growth per year. The failure to honestly admit this means that every political debate is befogged.
Now, some of the fools who supported Ms. Truss, and then wanted Mr. Johnson back, are resorting to a Trumpist betrayal narrative about Mr. Sunak – that his elevation was part of a “globalist” plot, imposing the will of stock-market speculators over the will of the people.
Opinion: Liz Truss’s legacy of ruin will have global economic consequences
Assuming that Mr. Sunak lasts till elections expected in 2024, he’ll presumably face the Labour Party leader, Keir Starmer, himself a serious man. Mr. Starmer struggled when facing Mr. Johnson, whose shamelessness made him maddeningly impervious to reasoned debate.
If Britain is lucky, the political contest in two years can be just about policy, and how to rescue this country after such a grim phase in its history.
The country must only hope that Mr. Johnson doesn’t burst back into British history again. But enough with suspense. Don’t bring back Boris. Bring back boring.
Tom Rachman