Rich man, poor man: Can a plutocrat prime minister fix ‘Broken Britain?’

Welcome to Broken Britain. Nothing works as it should. Everything costs more than it used to. Only the tourists have money to spend. Everyone is angry. No one agrees on why Britain is like this. Is it Brexit? Is it inflation? Is it the price rises, especially in food and energy bills, that even the government admits have caused a “cost-of-living crisis”? Is it because the British are, contrary to their reputation, a nation of idle slobs?

Everyone agrees whose fault it is. The Conservative Party coined “Broken Britain” when it was in opposition back in 2007. The new Conservative leader, David Cameron, accused the governing Labour Party of causing a “moral collapse” into crime, drugs, welfare dependency, and single motherhood. The Conservatives have been in power since 2010. All these social ills have worsened, and the collapse is more than moral. As British society devolves into chaos, the architecture of the British state is coming apart.

The tax burden is now higher than at any time since the end of World War II. Legal and illegal immigration are at the highest levels ever. So is the number of recorded crimes and the percentage of the permanently unemployed. No elected politician dares to suggest that there might be a connection. Nor is it considered polite to wonder aloud why it is that the ads in the Tube carriages now need to be interspersed with orders not to harass other passengers sexually, advice on how to intervene if you see someone being sexually harassed, and tips on how to report it once you’ve been sexually harassed.

The Conservatives did not break Britain alone. Public sector spending and the deficit rose consistently under the Labour governments of Tony Blair (1997-2007) and Gordon Brown (2007-10). Still, after pausing for “austerity” cutbacks under Cameron (2010-16), the Conservatives have spent like socialists since 2016. The prime ministers come and go (Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, Rishi Sunak), but government spending keeps rising, and so do the taxes that fund it. And now Britain is about to break the Conservatives.

By law, the next general election must be held by the end of January 2025. In practical terms, that means before the end of 2024. Labour has been around 20 points ahead in the polls since Sept. 6, 2022, the day that Johnson resigned as prime minister. According to YouGov, if the general election were held today, Sunak, or, if you’re President Joe Biden, “Rashid Sanook,” would win only 23% of the vote, making him the worst-performing Conservative leader in the party’s history. The Conservatives would crash from the 365-seat landslide that Johnson won in 2019 to as few as 150 seats — worse than their 1997 wipeout, when John Major won only 165 seats and Blair stormed in.

The Conservatives were out of power for a generation after 1997. They are headed for a similar exile now. In 2019, Johnson created a new Conservative coalition. He welded the London-centric, socially liberal voters of southern England to the London-phobic, socially conservative voters of northern England. Carried by his charisma and campaigning on a single issue, “Get Brexit Done,” Johnson breached Labour’s “Red Wall” of historically working-class seats. This was a historic realignment of the kind achieved by Margaret Thatcher in 1979 and Blair in 1997. When Johnson’s fellow Conservatives deposed him, his coalition collapsed.

On the Conservative left, metropolitan and anti-Brexit Conservatives are switching to the Liberal Democrats. On the Conservative right, it’s worse. Northern voters are returning to Labour or despairing of electoral politics and declaring they won’t bother voting at all. The populist right is, once again, in revolt against a Conservative Party that seems uninterested in conserving anything. In April 2020, Reform U.K. was polling at 2%, even lower than the Green Party. By the end of 2023, Reform U.K. was breaching 10% in the polls.

That would be enough to displace dozens of “safe seat” Conservative members of Parliament in the general election. These MPs were given their safe seats by party committees that sought to shape the party for the future, typically in the image of the southern, liberal wing of the Cameron-era Conservatives. Many of them are familiar faces with government experience. If they lose their seats, the party would effectively be decapitated. Sunak has less than a year to save not just his job but also the Conservative Party as we know it.

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If you asked an ad agency to invent a prime minister for modern Britain, the resulting pitch might look like Rishi Sunak. He is the brown-skinned son of Hindu immigrants with a backstory in the British Empire. He is financially astute. He is a global thinker with a future-facing, problem-solving mind. If only he were a natural politician, too.

No one in Britain talks about the “British dream,” as even the British now dream of success in American terms, but Sunak’s story is a uniquely British dream of social ascent and meritocratic opportunity. His grandparents were economic migrants from British India to East Africa. His father was, like Barack Obama’s father, born in Kenya, and his mother was born in Tanganyika, now Tanzania. They came to Britain in the 1960s and opened a pharmacy in the southern port of Southampton. They worked so hard and saved so much that they were able to educate their three children privately.

Rishi, the Sunaks’ oldest child and first son, helped his parents with the books in the evenings and worked as a waiter in a curry house during summer vacations. He became head boy of Winchester College, one of the most prestigious schools in Britain, and then took a first-class degree in politics, philosophy, and economics at the University of Oxford. The PPE course was created in the 1920s as a primer for public service. First, however, Sunak took the no-less-traditional diversion into that other school for would-be Conservative MPs, the City of London. He worked as an analyst at Goldman Sachs, became a hedge fund manager at a company called the Children’s Investment Fund, paused for an MBA at Stanford University, and then became a partner in a Californian hedge fund, Theleme Partners.

In 2009, Sunak married a fellow Stanford MBA, Akshata Murty. They have two daughters. Murty is the daughter of Indian billionaire N.R. Narayana Murty, who is one of the seven founders of the multinational IT company Infosys, which is India’s second-biggest IT company. Narayana Murty has co-chaired the World Economic Forum’s knees-up at Davos. Time magazine has called him the “father of the Indian IT sector.” In 2013, he made Sunak a director of one of his companies, Catamaran Ventures, whose U.K. subsidiary is owned by Akshata Murty.

Sunak had interned at the Conservative Party’s central office as a student and joined the party. In 2015, he inherited a safe seat from William Hague after Cameron promoted Hague to the House of Lords. Almost immediately, Sunak faced a crucial decision: to back Cameron in opposing Brexit or to side with the pro-Brexit rebels led by Johnson?

Sunak backed Brexit. Perhaps he had a better feel for the public mood than the patrician Cameron, who called a referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union because he was confident that he and the Remainers would win. Perhaps Sunak, who had written a research paper on the value of post-Brexit free ports, was voting like a hedge fund manager. The City of London could see the advantages in extracting Britain’s financial services industries from the EU’s regulatory net, making the most of the global economy and turning London into “Singapore-on-Thames.”

Only two years after entering Parliament, Sunak became a government minister. The new prime minister, Theresa May, was a compromise between the Remainers and Brexiteers. She staffed her unstable Cabinet on similar lines. Sunak voted in favor of all three of her failed attempts to pass her version of the treaty for Britain’s withdrawal from the EU. Then, when the Brexiteers overthrew her in July 2019, he backed Johnson for the top job.

In mid-February 2020, Johnson, having won his landslide, rewarded Sunak by appointing him chancellor of the exchequer. Yet again, Sunak faced a crisis almost immediately and managed it successfully. Sunak was ideally qualified to plot a post-Brexit economic course for Britain. But his brief changed. Only days after he had moved into 11 Downing Street, just next door to Johnson, the coronavirus pandemic broke out.

Instead of opening Britain’s economy to the world, Sunak was charged with saving British society from collapse. On March 20, 2020, he announced massive subsidies for British companies and an unprecedented “furlough” scheme in which the government paid up to 80% of workers’ salaries. He seems to have worked with remarkable speed and efficiency amid a government handicapped by a sclerotic, risk-averse civil service. He was also clearsighted enough to oppose the second and third of the three lockdowns that caused so much public misery and economic harm.

Sunak kept up the pace and the flow of subsidies for the next two years. His schemes preserved Britain’s corporate infrastructure and saved British workers from a 1930s-style crash. These were the right things to do, electorally and morally, at the time. Unfortunately, they were also expensive. So were other schemes, such as the “Eat Out to Help Out” campaign in which the government paid half the check in pubs and restaurants. The chancellor who might have transformed the British economy for the 21st century instead transported it back to the 1970s, when interventionist governments cooked the books and subsidized service industries by issuing “Luncheon Vouchers” to be used in restaurants instead of cash.

Sunak became popular for his generosity with other people’s money. In a September 2020 poll, admittedly an outlying artifact of the COVID-19 madness, he had the highest ratings of any chancellor since 1978. The obscure neophyte was now tipped to be Johnson’s successor. The tabloids were calling Sunak, a vegetarian teetotaler who rises early and pumps his Peloton pedals before dawn, “Dishi Rishi.” The extra attention soon led to suspicions about “Fishi Rishi.”

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In November 2020, the Guardian claimed that Sunak had failed in his ministerial duty to declare “relevant” assets to the register of ministerial interests. The assets in question all belonged to his wife, Akshata Murty. Her shares in Infosys were worth 430 million pounds, about $550 million. This, the Guardian sniped, made her “one of the wealthiest women in Britain, with a fortune larger than the Queen’s,” and Sunak almost certainly the wealthiest British prime minister ever. Other Murty assets included a direct shareholding in a British company that runs restaurant chains in India and in five other companies, including New & Lingwood, which, the Guardian said, “supplies the tailcoats worn by pupils at Eton College.”

Sunak’s own assets went into a blind trust when he entered government. In April 2022, an independent investigation found him blameless. By then, Murty’s finances were again in the papers. As a “non-domiciled” taxpayer, Murty paid a single 30,000-pound annual fee that allowed her to live in Britain but avoid taxation on an estimated 20 million pounds, about $25 million, in non-U.K. earnings. This was entirely legal, but it looked bad.

As chancellor, Sunak had raised taxes to historically stratospheric levels and lectured the public on the need to take the medicine. As husband, he seemed to be benefitting from his wife’s tax avoidance, entirely legal though it was. It also emerged that Sunak, who had obtained a U.S. green card in the 2000s, had retained it after resuming British residence, including during his first 18 months as chancellor. If he wanted to give the impression that he was in government until something better came up in Silicon Valley, this was how to do it.

Akshata Murty now pays U.K. taxes. Sunak has informed the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services that being prime minister is a full-time job requiring British residency, so he must renounce his green card. An inquiry has, of course, cleared him, but the damage is done. Sunak doesn’t just look like a plutocrat. He is one.

Britain is not America. At a time when the little people are broke and resentful, his personal wealth and the wealth and influence of his wife’s family are electoral handicaps. If you and your wife have multiple homes, the least you can do is build a few for some of the little people — especially if you cannot control illegal immigration.

Fortunately for Sunak, the public did not elect him. Sunak was in the background when Johnson was overthrown in September 2022 over his passing involvement in drinks parties at Downing Street during the coronavirus lockdowns. After a televised leadership debate in which Sunak came off as peevish and entitled, the party membership elected Liz Truss. Her desperate attempt to jump-start the economy did not convince Sunak’s friends in the City of London, and she lasted just 44 days. Conservative MPs then elected Sunak. He holds the office, but they hold the power.

From Dishi Rishi to Fishi Rishi and now “Squishi Rishi.” Caught between factions, Sunak is trying to reconcile Johnson’s impossible promises with the fiscal realities that Sunak himself played a crucial part in creating. He is feinting to the right of public opinion while pivoting to the center in the House of Commons to save his neck: pursuing Johnson’s daft scheme to deport illegal immigrants to Rwanda while exiling the party’s populists and bringing back Cameron. This may keep Sunak in office, but it will doom the Conservatives in the general election.

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Not unlike Paul Ryan, Sunak is the best man for the economic job but the worst man for the political job. He is exposed as one of nature’s head boys: a servant of the real power, in a schoolboy’s suit. He lacks the money and political support to deploy his economic acumen. He has the instinct for office but not the common touch.

No one is better equipped to fix the economy of Broken Britain. Then again, no one did more to break it, for the best of all reasons. This is not Sunak’s tragedy, though he may find it a little frustrating when an impecunious, enraged, and, yes, economically ignorant electorate refuses to pay the tab for the policies it demanded. He will be fine, anyway, because life really is different for the rich. The tragedy is that of the people he will leave behind.

Dominic Green is a columnist for the Washington Examiner and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Follow him on Twitter @drdominicgreen.