Fab flaw: the Beatles-loving Sunak has lost my respect

As a Blairite, I have long thought that Rishi Sunak was the best of the available Conservative leadership candidates.

- JOHN RENTOUL

He put up taxes to pay for the NHS. He even chose the same tax that Tony Blair and Gordon Brown put up to pay for the NHS in 2002: national insurance. What is not to like?

Sunak’s response to the coronavirus recession was pretty much what would have been expected of Brown if he had been chancellor at the time. The big, bold use of what Sunak called the overwhelming might of the British state” to save people’s jobs with the furlough scheme and business support: it was so Gordon that I could imagine Tony, if he had been prime minister at the time, complaining that it was too left wing.

Sunak is my kind of centrist. He even sounds like Tony Blair: a pleasant timbre, a demotic-posh accent, and the plain English of Bipartisan Reasonableness.

Naturally, I was cast down when he tried to tell Conservative Party members what they didn’t want to hear, which sounded terribly reasonable to me but which, naturally enough, they didn’t like. I assumed that his career was over; that Liz Truss would be a disaster in office; but I assumed it would take longer for reality to impose itself than it did. By then, I assumed that a new candidate would have emerged and that Sunak would have been forgotten.