I think the nicest thing that can be said about Sunak is that he wasn’t as bad as Truss or Johnson. The Northern Leg of HS2 was scrapped to keep Sunak positive and lift him out of his funk.
By the end of June, Sunak was in a deep funk. A senior adviser said: “At that point, Rishi was punch drunk. He spent a lot of his time in a very bad place. He goes through long periods of just being really down because he can’t understand why it’s happening. He doesn’t really get it.”
Sunak’s inability to move the dial with the public was the first major failure of his professional life. His incomprehension at his lack of success said a lot about his relative inexperience and naivety about politics. In one outburst he complained: “Why do people not realise I’m right?”
After Winchester, Oxford, Stanford and Goldman Sachs, another friend said: “His whole life has been an equation — ‘the harder I work, the better I do’ — and politics doesn’t work like that.” A cabinet minister said: “He’s the kid who does all his homework and can’t understand why he hasn’t got an A.”
TSE
