Rishi Sunak, the New Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland

King Charles III welcomes Rishi Sunak during an audience at Buckingham Palace, where he invited the newly elected leader of the Conservative Party to become prime minister and form a new government, in London, on Oct. 25, 2022. (Aaron Chown - WPA Pool/Getty Images)

Commentary

Following Rishi Sunak’s handshake with King Charles III at Buckingham Palace, the United Kingdom now has its third prime minister in just over three months, and there will be few celebrations.

A survey released in the last days of the Truss administration gave the Labour Party a vast 36-point lead, which is the highest ever recorded for any UK party. So, the Conservative Party has two years until the next general election to try to solve the nation’s manifold problems, or else face an electoral wipeout.

Deposing a prime minister after only 44 days isn’t normal practice in a mature, stable democracy, but that was the fate of Sunak’s predecessor, Liz Truss. To find a replacement, the normally urbane and procedure-based Conservative Party ripped up its rule book and was forced to issue new diktats on the hoof.

Following the abrupt departure of Boris Johnson on July 7, a 60-day leadership process ensued, which was two weeks longer than the entire Truss premiership lasted.

This time around, members of Parliament (MPs) were given just one weekend to select candidates, who needed to garner 100 votes from their peers to qualify. Only Sunak managed to do so, and on Oct. 24, he was declared the new leader of the Conservative Party and UK prime minister—just four days after Truss resigned.

The speedy process incensed Tory party members as they were denied their traditional right to vote on who their leader would be, but then there was only one candidate, making this a very undemocratic leadership contest.

Truss’s demise revealed that it doesn’t matter what the prime minister of the day intends to do if the party wants something else.

Margaret Thatcher learned that, to her detriment, in 1990. Back then, the Tory establishment wanted closer financial ties with Europe, which she opposed. Despite having won three elections in a row with commanding majorities, they still showed her the door.

Truss was in power for less than two months but clearly wasn’t following their script either, so now she’s gone, too. What the Conservative Party really wants in a leader is a political bureaucrat that will do their deep-state bidding; so is this what they now have in  Sunak?

Britain’s First Hindu and Most Wealthy Prime Minister

Sunak’s Indian parents emigrated to the United Kingdom from Africa in the 1960s. He was educated at private schools and studied at Oxford before working at Goldman Sachs. He earned an MBA at Stanford in 2006 on a Fulbright scholarship, where he met his future wife, Akshata Murthy, daughter of billionaire N.R. Narayana Murthy.

After serving as a partner in two hedge fund firms, he turned to politics and was elected as an MP in the safest of all Conservative seats, in Richmond, in 2015. He rose quickly in the party and became finance minister under Boris Johnson from 2020 to 2022, the lockdown years.

The two worked closely together on the lockdown and vaccine programs, as well as dealing with alleged man-made global warming, with Sunak calling for “decisive progress in the transition to net-zero.”

Yet in 2022, he turned against Johnson, and his resignation precipitated 61 other departures from the government.

Astonishingly, though predictably, Johnson put himself forward as a leadership candidate over the weekend. For many of his fellow MPs, he carried too much baggage from the Partygate scandal to be taken seriously. One former Conservative Party leader, Lord William Hague, feared Johnson would send the party into a “death spiral” if elected.

The Times of London quoted MP Dominic Raab, who backed Sunak, as saying: “We’d be back in the sort of Groundhog Day of Partygate. We must get the country, the government moving forward.”

He failed to add that Sunak was also fined for breaking social exclusion laws after attending a gathering at 10 Downing Street.

Another scandal for the Sunak family is the allegation that his wife claimed non-domicile status while he was finance minister to avoid paying some UK tax.

Why Did Truss’s Party Stop Trusting Her?

With Truss’s strident anti-Putin views and commitment to stoking the disastrous war in Ukraine, which she demonstrated while serving as UK foreign secretary, she must have seemed like the ideal leadership candidate.

But when in power, she pursued a low-tax policy, was pro-Brexit, and wanted to clamp down on illegal immigration. She also wanted to tackle the energy crisis by turning to fossil fuels once again, particularly fracking. All of these are anathema to the left-leaning and green Conservatives-in-name-only that now run the party.

When her finance minister, Kwasi Kwarteng, announced in his mini-budget that he would be reducing the top tax rate to 40 percent from 45 percent on incomes of over 150,000 pounds ($172,000) per year, along with other reductions on social security and property tax, he was attempting to get back to the Tories’ previous low-tax, high-growth hinterland.

He told reporters, “High taxes reduce incentives to work, and they hinder enterprise.” But the markets reacted negatively, with many wondering how the tax cuts could be paid for. So did his party, and he was removed.

But there was really nothing low-tax about the 40 percent top rate, as that was just a return to levels levied under arch-socialist Tony Blair, whose New Labour government kept the rate at 40 percent, having inherited it from Thatcher’s last government.

When Thatcher came to power in 1979, her socialist predecessors had raised it to 83 percent, and it took her entire time in office to reduce the rate to less than half of that.

But in 2010, Labour’s Gordon Brown introduced a higher rate of 50 percent.

This was reduced to 45 percent in 2013 after Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron rediscovered conservative rule 101, that higher tax rates don’t necessarily produce higher revenues. Probably for political reasons, he stuck with 45 percent as a compromise, and it was that same fear of voter backlash that probably cost Kwarteng his job.

Certainly, Truss wasn’t helped by President Joe Biden’s diplomatically unusual intervention, in which he called her economic policies “a mistake.” Five days later, she resigned.

Biden can add this to his long list of unwise foreign interventions, although as an Irish socialist at heart, he may view helping to bring down a Conservative government as a success.

Had Truss stood by her man Kwarteng and their joint policy, she would have retained some respect, if not her job. Instead, she threw him under the bus, did a complete U-turn on their economic recovery plan, and got foisted with a new “Second Lord of the Treasury.”

Jeremy Hunt was brought out of obscurity to be the replacement finance minister tasked with scrapping Truss’s tax cuts, leaving her humiliated as a puppet prime minister who knew her short time was up.

Can Sunak Save the Tories, Let Alone the Country?

About his predecessor, Sunak said in his first speech to the nation after accepting the king’s invitation to form a government: “I admired her restlessness to create change. But some mistakes were made. Not borne of ill will or bad intentions. Quite the opposite, in fact. But mistakes, nonetheless. And I have been elected as leader of my party, and your prime minister, in part, to fix them.”

Turning around such a huge Labour lead in two years is a tall order, but that will be his first priority. Therefore, he’s unlikely to look for long-term policy changes on energy and the economy, but rather short-term, feel-good fixes.

Although the Conservatives hold an impressive 80-seat majority, that was really an illusory result due to Johnson vacuuming up the Brexit votes that would have gone to Nigel Farage’s Reform UK had he not selflessly stood his party down at the last election to ensure Brexit would finally get through Parliament.

Those special conditions won’t apply next time as Brexit has now been passed, although the Tories could argue a vote for Labour would see Britain all but back in the EU again. The nightmare scenario for them would be if Farage decides to step back into the political arena and take those Brexit votes back for the Reform party.

Sunak has some tough months ahead.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.