54 Britain The EconomistNovember 28th 2020
R
ishi sunakis one of the most familiar figures in British poli-
tics. An assiduous public-relations campaign has ensured that
the newspapers bulge with profiles of him and his photogenic
family. Pundits speculate about how long it will be before he
moves into Number 10. Economic policy is now associated with
his skinny suits and easy smile in much the same way that it was
once associated with Gordon Brown’s crumpled clothes and
grumpy scowl.
Yet beyond Mr Sunak’s fabulous wealth and professional com-
petence, not much is known about him. There are several reasons
for this opacity. His rise has been so swift that he has left few
traces. In early 2015 he was just another bored banker looking for a
safe Conservative seat. By early 2019 he was a junior local-govern-
ment minister dealing with public lavatories. From there he vault-
ed into Number 11.
The Conservative Party’s various factions project what they
want onto the young chancellor: social liberals see him as one of
their own because he is from an ethnic minority, while right-wing-
ers welcome him as a fellow-Brexiteer. Mr Sunak’s prteam keeps
the screen as blank as possible. Revelations that he likes “Star
Wars” and Christmas songs have not been followed by disclosures
about his philosophy of life or what makes him tick as a politician.
But the deeper reason is that Mr Sunak has two warring identities.
The first identity is that of a pragmatist who tacks to the politi-
cal winds. He got the job of chancellor when his predecessor, Sajid
Javid, fell out with Boris Johnson over plans by the prime minis-
ter’s now-departed chief adviser, Dominic Cummings, for Number
10 to seize control of economic policy. As an mpfor Richmond, in
North Yorkshire, who campaigned energetically across the North
of England in the December election, he is an enthusiastic suppor-
ter of the prime minister’s agenda of “levelling up” the country and
consolidating the party’s recent gains in poorer places far from
London. When the covid-19 crisis broke, he announced that “this is
not the time for ideology and orthodoxy” and that he was willing to
do “whatever it takes” to save the country from disaster. His first
budget represented “the largest sustained fiscal boost for 30 years”.
The spending review which he delivered with his usual aplomb
on November 25th was designed by Rishi-the-pragmatist, whoseKeynesian mantra is “we’re prioritising jobs” and who reeled off a
mind-boggling list of spending commitments. It was also a very
political budget. Mr Sunak boasted of the “highest sustained level
of public investment in more than 40 years”, repeatedly nodded to
manifesto commitments to build more hospitals and increase po-
lice numbers, and conveniently scattered his largesse around mar-
ginal northern constituencies.
But there is another, more ideological Rishi. Mr Sunak may be a
social liberal who took his parliamentary oath on a copy of the Bha-
gavad Gita, but he is also a chip off the old Thatcherite block, even
down to the stories about working in the family shop. His parents
were immigrants who scrimped to send him to Winchester Col-
lege, one of the country’s best and most expensive schools. He
spent his early career in two of the world’s centres of creative de-
struction—working for Goldman Sachs in New York and studying
business at Stanford University in Silicon Valley. He has the same
bullish pride in being British as Margaret Thatcher had. He values
the country’s institutions—he describes his time at Winchester
(where he was head boy) as “absolutely marvellous”—loves cricket
and football, and relishes the rural rituals in his constituency. He
came out in favour of leaving the euin 2015, even though the party
establishment was vigorously pro-Remain—a brave position for
an ambitious new arrival.
He also has the same ingrained enthusiasm for balancing bud-
gets and limiting expenditure as the grocer’s daughter had. He
likes to tell the story of how he learned the rudiments of econom-
ics, including the importance of things like National Insurance
and vatrates, by helping his mother do the accounts at her phar-
macy when he was still at school. In one of his first speeches in par-
liament in 2015 he noted that tax receipts had remained at around
36-38% of the economy since 1955 and that this suggested a “natu-
ral ceiling to what any government can extract from the pockets of
its hard-working taxpayers”. In his speech to this year’s virtual
Conservative Party conference he vowed to balance the budget in
the medium term and spoke about the “sacred duty” to leave the
finances strong.Showing steel
Which Rishi Sunak will dominate in the long term? While interest
rates remain low, there will be little pressure for him to balance the
books. Even so, the chancellor’s Thatcherite instincts are likely to
play a growing role in shaping British politics. There were flashes
of steel in the spending-review announcement. Mr Sunak not only
froze most public-sector wages and reduced foreign aid from 0.7%
of gdpto 0.5% (which would have delighted Thatcher). He also re-
duced planned spending: excluding emergency expenditure on
the virus, he cut more than £10bn a year from departmental spend-
ing plans next year. As the economy recovers, the Thatcherite Rishi
is likely to become more assertive.
Mr Cummings’s attempt to grab power from Number 11 failed, at
least in part because the Treasury has performed so much better
than other departments have in the course of the pandemic. Mr Su-
nak’s reputation in his party and the country has continued to rise
as Mr Johnson’s has sunk. He has also acquired a cohort of influen-
tial supporters among mps as his star has risen. Strong chancellors
have always used their power in the past to shape policy and the
economy. Nigel Lawson was a joint architect of Thatcherism, and
Gordon Brown ran a rival domestic administration to Tony Blair.
Under Mr Sunak, the ghost of Thatcher, handbag and all, will stalk
the corridors of power. 7Bagehot Sunak’s secret self
The chancellor’s inner Thatcher is desperate to escape