What a terrible choice. I always think Sunak looks like a 13 year old and can’t weigh more than 9 stone. He says he’ll stand up to China but I’m not sure he could stand up to a strong breeze.
He kept talking how his parents worked hard. His father was a GP and his mother a pharmacist. He went to a school with fees of £22,000 a year. My parents worked hard too, but we lived in a council house and I went to a secondary modern school.
He is too clever by half and someone I am immediately suspicious of. His suits are said to cost £3,500 - although they look like Norman Wisdom cast offs - and he looks like the kind of man who denies himself nothing.
He was educated at Winchester but they obviously didn’t teach him any manners since he constantly interrupted Truss and talked over her. It is not an attractive look is it?
Sunak was a partner at some hedge funds and according to The Times, Sunak was a multi-millionaire in his mid-twenties. I don't care who you are, becoming that rich (he's said to be the richest MP in the House) by 25 isn't just by hard work.
Anyone who has worked for Goldman Sachs is, by definition in my opinion, money orientated. And we know he held a US green card and has a house in California worth $6 million apparently. The green card is to allow people who intend to take up permanent residence to work in the USA in the meantime and pay tax there. We still don't know if he did.
Yet he declares how much he loves Britain and wants to be PM paying £164,080 a year. He can't be wanting to do it for the money, it's just a trophy, as it was for Johnson.
Sunak also has Gordon Brown’s habit of believing that whatever level of borrowing he has set is the right one. He went for Truss over her plans to increased borrowing by £40 billion and repeated the figure for emphasis. In the three years to the end of 2021 the UK government borrowed around £500 billion or so as debt went from 83% to 103% of GDP but that was apparently OK. He was either chief secretary to the Treasury or chancellor for most of that period.
His understanding of Britain's productivity problem is I am afraid, way off. Sunak has never worked in industry for a single minute and has no idea at all why we lag behind continental competitors. He has a strange belief that free ports where normal tax and regulations don't apply, are the answer. They are not the quick (or even slow) fix he thinks they are.
His campaign is based on him being a Thatcherite, but he is an enthusiastic supporter of Brexit and Britain’s withdrawal from the single market, something she would never have contemplated. It was her proudest achievement and he has trashed it. Anyone who campaigned for Brexit I usually regard as a half-wit and he has done nothing to change my opinion.
However, if I was Sunak, I wouldn’t get my hopes up. Tory party members don’t like slick. They don’t like people who plot behind the back of the prime minister as Sunak did when he quietly registered his leadership campaign website in December 2021. Disloyalty is not seen as a desirable trait in any case.
But disloyalty to Johnson is a mortal sin for many Tory members, 10,000 of whom have signed a petition to have Johnson on the ballot paper. That’s at least 10,000 votes Sunak won’t get.
They also don’t like the party having the highest tax rate for 70 years, which Sunak has presided over. In addition, the ERG don't want him even though he's a Brexiteer because some of them claim he doesn't understand it.
And for all the talk of diversity in the Conservative party, the members are not going to vote for him because of one other thing. He isn’t white.
