At 42 years of age, Rishi Sunak is the youngest PM in modern British history. He’s also married to the daughter of Narayana Murthy and heiress of the benumbing Infosys fortune, making him the wealthiest British PM.
By Tiko Okoye
A series of occurrences starting from 2014 have combined to paint compelling spectacles on Great Britain’s political canvas, with Rushi Sunak, the Chancellor of the Exchequer (finance minister) under Boris Johnson entering the record books with several eye-popping firsts.
As the son of Indian parents who migrated to the United Kingdom from Kenya, he became the first-ever person of colour – euphemism for non-white – to preside as the Prime Minister of Great Britain. And at 42 years of age, Sunak is the youngest PM in modern British history. He’s also married to the daughter of Narayana Murthy and heiress of the benumbing Infosys fortune, making him the wealthiest British PM.
But let’s start telling the tale from its auspicious beginnings. Sunak could very well be said to be the brains of then-candidate Boris Johnson-led collective that succeeded in elbowing Brexit-pussyfooting Prime Minister David Cameron out of Tory leadership and installing Theresa May as his successor. A short while later, the same group forced May to call for a snap general election in 2019 which Boris and his men won by a landslide. Rishi Sunak was named the Chancellor of the Exchequer (Finance Minister).
Then followed a series of allegations that called Johnson’s leadership integrity to question. There are many within the Conservative Party who believe that ‘Teflon Johnson’ – the swashbuckling British politician with more lives than a cat – would still have survived the dizzying fall in public opinion polls and confounded his detractors if he hadn’t been ‘betrayed’ by members of his kitchen cabinet who left him in the lurch by resigning in droves when he desperately needed their support the most.
After Johnson was forced to resign from office, two candidates made it to the final round in the conservative leadership election timetable that involved voting by the party membership: Rishi Sunak and then-foreign affairs minister Liz Truss. It was clear from the onset that Sunak was not only the favourite of his fellow Tory MPs, but he was by far the better prepared candidate. Still, I correctly predicted that once the matter was ceded to the general party membership to decide, Truss would trounce Sunak for two principal reasons.
First, I deemed Rishi Sunak’s ambition to be dead on arrival given that Johnson has a nearly vice-like grip on the vast majority of the Tory base as Donald Trump has a lock on MAGA Republicans ready and willing to do his bidding without any questions asked. I surmised that given a scenario where many MPs and party members were chafing at how badly Sunak’s ‘betrayal’ – by being the first topmost cabinet minister to abandon ship – had hurt their ‘main man,’ they would do everything necessary to inflict the agony of defeat on him.
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Second was the elephant lurking in the room that everyone was pretending not to notice by reason of political correctness. The debacle was created by the conservatives and it was certain to catch the likes of Sunak on the rebound. In order to successfully deliver on its Brexit plank, the Tories went overboard with an anti-immigrant sloganeering. And truth be said, you cannot be talking of finally being able to liberate Great Britain from the shackles of immigrants and giving Britain back to the (original) Brits without raising the spectre of widespread loathing for immigrants – of which Rishi Sunak is one.
He was guaranteed a fair chance only if voting was limited to MPs since many are in his old-boy networks comprising Oxbridge alumni and well-heeled families. But the party hoi-polloi was an entirely different kettle of fish. It therefore came as no surprise to me that he lost. And let me categorically declare here without any fear or favour that Sunak would’ve lost a second round and victory would’ve gone the way of parliamentary leader Penny Mordaunt, if both of them had been put to online vote of the conservative party members as the normal timetable demands.
It shouldn’t be glossed over that very much in the manner of exiled French Emperor Napoleon returning in triumphal glory from the Island of Elba, his first place of exile in 1814-1815, Johnson rushed back from a family holiday in the Caribbean to offer himself as Truss’s replacement, and the conventional wisdom is that he could’ve easily won. Meanwhile, Rishi Sunak prudently refrained from announcing his own candidature until he had had an eyeball-to-eyeball conversation with his former boss.
Good enough, majority of highly influential Tory leaders told Johnson that a second coming as PM amidst the yet-to-be-resolved dark clouds swirling over his head would sound the death knell of the party – and he accepted to withdraw from the race. But the embedded irony in the macabre tale wasn’t lost on many. A candidate who was considered unfit for the job and had lost the same leadership tussle to Truss less than two months was now being touted as the fittest man for the job; Jephthah’s rehabilitation wasn’t even that rapid and effortless!
However, the 50 or so MPs who put their necks on the line by going public and over the top with their support for Johnson are not just seething silently with rage and frustration. They are openly expressing their disgust at what they perceive to be Johnson’s “meaningless promises” and being left up the creek without a paddle, as Americans would say. Suffice to also say that by exiting a second time from the public square with so little grace, Johnson has equally done irreparable damage to his political future.
Not surprisingly, opposition parties are calling for a general election. They contend that the governing party now has a policy programme that is radically different from the original manifesto that paved the way for its landslide victory in 2019. Besides, they further aver that by emerging without the mandate of the Tory membership, it was imperative to seek a fresh mandate from British voters.
That quite a number of Johnson loyalists are lending their voices to calls for a general election may portend rough patches ahead for the conservatives. Still, it’s no more than political gaslighting. No matter the absurdity or awkwardness a revolving door at 10 Downing Street presents to the general public, the MPs in particular must seem to be solidly united behind Rishi Sunak’s leadership – not unless they all want to commit seppuku by allowing the conduct of a general election and be ready to lose their jobs considering that the popularity rating of the conservative party is at its lowest point in over 40 years!
There are a couple of takeaways for Nigerians from this British saga. First, those fond of mealy-mouthing a lack of internal party democracy ought to have a rethink. The conservative leadership election timetable provides for a process that ends with the two candidates with the most votes at the close of nominations being put to online vote of the entire party membership.
But this time around, the parliamentary leadership opted to staunch internal haemorrhaging and divisive bickering by significantly abridging the process and taking all necessary steps to ensure that there’s only one candidate left standing at the end of the first two ballots to obviate the need for party membership voting. This is the equivalent of an indirect primary in Nigeria. Just imagine what would’ve happened if Britain and Nigeria had swapped places? The floodgates would’ve been opened to multiple lawsuits alleging a violation of the constitutions and conventions of the country and party!
That’s why the recent decision by Nigerian courts to throw out such lawsuits for lack of jurisdiction as the power to pick candidates for elective offices is solely the business of political parties must be highly commended. The legitimate goal of political parties is to win elections. A party where godfathers keep imposing candidates on their members would only learn to do the right thing when it suffers the pain of serial defeats at the polls, not through judicial interventions.
The supposition that the ascendancy of minorities like Rishi Sunak into high offices has a trickle-down diversity effect on vulnerable populations isn’t backed by any empirical evidence. The emergence of Barack Obama as the first black man to serve as POTUS arguably opened several closed doors of opportunity for minorities. But this is attributable to the fact that he ran on the socially-liberal platform of the Democratic Party.
Where a party – as in the case of the US Republican Party or the British Tory Party – has clearly demonstrable anti-immigrant and anti-minority tendencies, the stark reality of the error of overcompensation implies even dire consequences for marginalized populations, underscoring a phantom trickle-down diversity. Nigerians, who have become besotted with a turn-by-turn presidency as the recipe for communal buy-in and sense of belonging are well advised to take another hard look at the baselessness of the phantom trickle-down diversity.
