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- Herausgeber: Biteback Publishing
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020
Three years ago, Rishi Sunak was an unknown junior minister in the Department of Local Government. By the age of thirty-nine, he was Chancellor of the Exchequer, grappling with the gravest economic crisis in modern history. Michael Ashcroft's new book charts Sunak's ascent from his parents' Southampton pharmacy to Oxford University, the City of London, Silicon Valley – and the top of British politics. It is the tale of a super-bright and hard-grafting son of immigrant parents who marries an Indian heiress and makes a fortune of his own; a polished urban southerner who wins over the voters of rural North Yorkshire – and a cautious, fiscally conservative financier who becomes the biggest-spending Chancellor in history. Sunak was unexpectedly promoted to the Treasury's top job in February 2020, with a brief to spread investment and opportunity as part of Boris Johnson's 'levelling up' agenda. Within weeks, the coronavirus had sent Britain into lockdown, with thousands of firms in peril and millions of jobs on the line. As health workers battled to save lives, it was down to Sunak to save livelihoods. This is the story of how he tore up the rulebook and went for broke.
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CONTENTS
AUTHOR’S ROYALTIES
Lord Ashcroft is donating all author’s royalties from Going for Broke to charity.viii
PREFACE
In the summer of 2019, a junior minister in the local government department posted an article on his constituency website explaining what a busy couple of weeks he had had. With the Conservative Party gripped by the campaign to choose a successor to Theresa May, he had been ‘working on initiatives to help people with council tax, ensuring the disabled have better toilet facilities when out and about and making sure our local councils are accountable for the decisions they take’.
A year later our Parliamentary Under-Secretary, occupied with the worthy but unglamorous stuff of government, was the Chancellor of the Exchequer, battling to defend the British economy from the devastating effects of a global pandemic. He was spending billions of pounds a week trying to protect jobs, businesses and public services. In doing so, he had exploded the budget deficit and become the most popular politician in the country.
Members of Parliament would once have expected to wait a decade or more between entering the Commons and joining the Cabinet, if they ever did. Rishi Sunak did so in fifty months. Elected to represent the Yorkshire seat of Richmond in May 2015, he became Chief Secretary to the Treasury in Boris Johnson’s new government in July 2019. Seven months later, he occupied one of the great offices of state, with a burden of responsibility the like of which few of his predecessors could claim to have faced. x
The speed of his ascent and the magnitude of the crisis meant that Sunak went from relative unknown to household name almost literally overnight. This in turn meant that the public knew little about the man who seemed to pop up every few days with a new bank-breaking initiative designed to ward off the economic effects of coronavirus.
I was intrigued myself. I wanted to know more about where he had come from, what his life had been like before he became the political celebrity of 2020, what those who have known and worked with him say he is really like, and what explains the trajectory of his remarkable career. I also wanted to chronicle his early months as Chancellor and his part in the government’s response to the biggest crisis to have confronted Britain in peacetime – and to gather some thoughts on what he might possibly do next.
Since my research only began after our protagonist had his feet well under the Chancellor’s desk, readers will appreciate that this book has had to be written more quickly than most such works. They will also understand that any blow-by-blow account of life inside Whitehall during the Covid-19 crisis will have to be the work of future historians; those involved are spending their time trying to overcome the pandemic, not talking about it.
Nevertheless, I am thankful to the many individuals who have shared their insights and impressions of Sunak with me or my research team, including friends, colleagues and other observers, both within and outside the political world.
This, then, is my account of the rise of Rishi Sunak. To the best of my knowledge, it is the first book devoted to the subject. I somehow doubt it will be the last.
Michael Ashcroft September 2020
CHAPTER 1
FRENCH CRICKET
What makes the perfect childhood? Google offers some 298 million answers to this vexed question, but there are some common themes: loving parents; a stable home environment; opportunities to have fun; the absence of want or fear. Throw in siblings to play with; a big house with a garden in the sort of leafy neighbourhood where children can mess about in the street; the best schooling money can buy; and plenty of time together as a family, and most of the ingredients are surely there.
Nobody can know quite what goes on behind closed doors, but there is everything to suggest that Rishi Sunak, who had all these things and more, had a wonderful start in life. His parents had left their home countries to come to Britain and now worked all hours to give their three children a comfortable life.
‘They were not political,’ Sunak has said. ‘We never talked about politics. They were just working the whole time … They were a classic Indian family. They came here, and their general view was that they were going to work really hard and they want to provide a better life for their kids.’1
The image of parents working, striving and making sacrifices in order to give opportunities to their children seems familiar, but the Sunaks’ history is quite remarkable. The story of a family that values 2commitment, determination, endeavour and the pursuit of education and opportunity goes back generations and covers three continents. It is the story of a family that was ready to take big risks in search of a better life.
Sunak’s father, Yashvir, is from an upper-middle-class Punjabi family who, before partition, came from Gujranwala, now in Pakistan. His parents, Ram Dass and Suhag Rani Sunak, were themselves both from educated families with strong ties to the British Raj – indeed, Yashvir’s maternal grandfather, Mr Luthera, was the postmaster of the Abbottabad Post Office, a prestigious role awarded to those considered especially loyal.
By 1935, tensions were rising between Hindus and Muslims and the future looked bleak on the subcontinent. With Britain needing skilled workers in East Africa, Ram Dass found himself a job as a clerical officer in Nairobi, Kenya. Taking a young bride to a new and unknown country was not considered safe, so he bought a one-way ticket aboard a ship and promised to send for his wife in time. While working in Nairobi, Ram Dass took courses to qualify as an accountant. He became a civil servant in Harambee House, now the office of the President of Kenya, and subsequently at the Treasury in Nairobi.
Upon Ram Dass’s departure to Africa, his young wife, Suhag Rani, migrated to New Delhi with her parents-in-law to ensure they had a footing in Hindu India. It meant an emotional goodbye not just to their ancestral home but to the happy, successful life they had enjoyed there and whose traditions had been established for centuries. In 1937, Suhag Rani joined her husband in Nairobi and the couple began to put down roots in a country vastly different from the one in which they had grown up.
Once settled in Kenya, Sunak’s paternal grandparents had six children – three girls and three boys, including Sunak’s father, Yashvir. 3For their higher education, the girls eventually returned to India, the country the family still considered its homeland. The boys, meanwhile, looked west. Harish Sunak, Yashvir’s elder brother, was offered a place at Liverpool University to study electrical engineering in 1966 – a great opportunity that he was able to take up with the help of grants, scholarships and the savings the family had managed to cobble together. The same year, Yashvir joined his brother in Liverpool to complete his A-levels. The pair lived together in student accommodation with sparse furniture and an even smaller income. A few years later, Ram Dass, Suhag Rani and the rest of the family joined the two boys in the UK.
Sunak’s mother, Usha, also grew up in a family of Hindu Punjabis. However, while her father, Raghubir Berry, grew up on the Indian side of the Punjab, her mother, Sraksha, was born in rural Tanganyika (now Tanzania) in a remote hut surrounded by lions. Although Sraksha grew up learning Swahili and considered Tanganyika her home, her family – like her future son-in-law’s – retained close ties with India.
At the age of sixteen, Sraksha entered an arranged marriage with Raghubir, who was working in Tanganyika as a rail engineer. Hers is a tale of extraordinary bravery: a few years later, with next to nothing in her pocket, she would head to the UK all alone, acting as an advance guard for the rest of her family, who would later follow.
Before that, however, this particularly smart and confident young woman persuaded her groom to move to Africa and build a new life with her there – a reversal of the usual ‘bidaai’ whereby the bride leaves her childhood home to join her husband. Raghubir soon found a job as a tax official in his new country, and the couple had three children – Usha and two younger brothers, Bharat and Ajay.
By the late 1960s, the family was keen to move to Britain – especially Sraksha, who was attracted to the land of Oxford and Shakespeare. While immigration rules made the move possible, finances were more 4of a problem. The future Chancellor’s grandmother sold all her wedding jewellery to buy her one-way ticket, leaving her husband and children behind in Tanzania in the hope – by no means certain – that they would be able to join her later.
Arriving in the UK in 1966 with no family or friends to greet her, Sraksha made her way to Leicester and rented a room as a paying guest in the home of an acquaintance. Having already learned to type, she made the most of a head for numbers and found a job as a bookkeeper with a local estate agent. She saved every penny she earned and in 1967 – her daughter Usha now aged fifteen – was able to send for her family and establish a home in Britain. The anglicised name Berry was probably adopted at this point to help with integration; the original surname is likely to have been the traditional Punjabi Beri. Raghubir joined the Inland Revenue, eventually receiving an MBE after many years of service.
After passing his A-levels, Yashvir went on to read medicine at Liverpool University, graduating in 1974. Usha, meanwhile, had graduated in pharmacology from Aston University in 1972. Introduced to each other by family friends, the couple were married in Leicester in July 1977.
Their first child, Rishi Sunak – he has no middle name – was born on 12 May 1980 at Southampton General Hospital. The happy parents took him home to 54 Richmond Gardens, their sizeable 1930s redbrick house in the city’s Portswood district, a couple of miles from the surgery on Raymond Road in Shirley where Yashvir now worked as a family doctor. Usha had been working as a manager at a local chemist, Weston Pharmacy, before she became pregnant for the first time, but she knew that with a young baby the role would be too much, and she left shortly before her son was born, figuring that in due course she could always become a locum – a job that would pay well 5and offer flexibility while enabling her to keep up her skills. As the family grew, with another son, Sanjay, arriving in 1982, followed by a daughter, Raakhi, in 1985, the couple decided to move to a leafier area of Southampton.
On the face of it, there was nothing very special about 21 Spindlewood Close, where the future Chancellor of the Exchequer spent much of his childhood. Built in the early 1980s, it was the sort of thoroughly ordinary-looking modern brick property that can be found in the suburbs of every city in England. With six bedrooms, two bathrooms and a double garage, it was ideal for a growing family. It sat one house from the end of a quiet tree-lined cul-de-sac in Bassett, a sought-after residential area to the north of Southampton city centre, near the university campus. To the back of the detached house lay Bassett Woods, where the children could play hide and seek and build dens. To the fore, the quiet road was the perfect place for a spot of French cricket, a game that the many youngsters of varying ages in the neighbourhood could all join in. It was the remarkable community spirit and friendships formed between the young families on the street that made it such an attractive place to live and meant many of those who moved in stayed for decades.
People on Spindlewood Close still remember the small boy with jet-black hair, a ready smile and lovely manners who used to wheel around on a bike with the other kids or kick a ball about with his little brother Sanjay. Janet and David Parnell moved into the house next door to the Sunaks in September 1984, when Rishi was four years old. Their children Luke, born in 1978, and Alice, born in 1981, grew up alongside the future Chancellor and his siblings. ‘They were lovely neighbours, a smashing couple; we miss them,’ recalls Janet, who used to work as a secretary at Southampton University. 6
The kids all used to play together. Ours were four and six when we moved in. There were at least a dozen children on the close … It was such a safe place to play, a really lovely spot. The whole Sunak family, including the children, were very friendly, very personable. Rishi was chattier than his brother Sanjay; always very polite and friendly.
Another former neighbour recalls:
It was a bit of a gang, a bit of a kids’ mafia, in the close. They’d be on bikes, because it was moderately safe then. The kids all had them, and the parents used to drive carefully. They used to get told off for playing cricket, because the ball would go into people’s gardens.
Everyone on the street seems to have liked Yashvir and Usha, who regularly invited neighbours round for dinner. ‘They often had dos with other people in the street. They cooked Indian food, and sometimes we did barbecues. Usha did one of the best curries we have ever had,’ Janet recalls. Nobody can recall talking about politics on these occasions, where conversation usually revolved around the usual middle-class preoccupations: work, holidays, school fees and how the kids were doing.
Neighbours were left in no doubt that the Sunaks were fiercely ambitious for their brood. ‘The parents were very supportive of all their children and their education – not pushing them; just wanting the best for them,’ Janet says, adding that all the Sunak offspring were good at talking to adults.
The primary school Yashvir and Usha chose for their elder son was Oakmount, an old-fashioned prep school which acted as a feeder for minor public schools. The couple had always believed that their children should have the best possible education, and the state primary 7school in the area at the time was, as one neighbour put it, ‘dire’. Its catchment area encompassed various downtrodden housing estates and blocks of social housing and was not viewed as an option by many local middle-class parents. Most either sent their children to church schools (which, given they were Hindus, was not a route open to the Sunaks) or went private.
Located just two miles from Spindlewood Close on the other side of Southampton Common, Oakmount made for an easy school run and had an excellent reputation. It had just 150 pupils and had been operated by the same family for generations. The Sunaks liked the look and feel of the place. Rishi’s education would begin there, at the age of four. The headmaster, Joe Savage, who ran the school with his wife June, had been there since 1961, when he had taken it over from his father, William. In addition to teaching maths, he loved shooting and passed on his passion at the .22 range in the school grounds to many of the boys, though history does not relate whether Sunak was an enthusiastic participant.
Andy and Liz Claughton, who lived two doors down from the Sunaks in Spindlewood Close, sent their son John, two years Rishi’s senior, to the same school and describe the place as a ‘little anachronism’ populated by the children of middle-class professionals, for whom the fees were within reach. ‘It was a traditional small prep school, of which there were many around here, back in the day,’ recalls Mr Claughton, a retired naval architect. ‘These schools were much of a muchness; they weren’t like the prep schools that feed Eton, but they did a good job.’ Mrs Claughton, a retired nurse, has a clear recollection of the head of kindergarten, a Mrs Everest, predicting that the young Rishi would go into medicine. ‘She always used to say that he’ll be a brain surgeon, or a heart surgeon. She knew how bright he was.’ 8
Indeed, Sunak was so academically able that he appears to have been moved up a year at Oakmount. The Claughtons say that despite being almost two years younger than their son, Sunak was in the same year group.
Then, in 1989, came a shock: the little school was closing. It all happened very suddenly. One minute, pupils were enjoying their Easter break; the next, they were being told that summer term would be their last at Oakmount. The letter from the headmaster, bluntly informing them that the schoolhouse and playing fields were being sold for development, sparked a stampede for places at other local independents.
The Sunaks chose Stroud, a private prep school for boys and girls aged three to thirteen and the main feeder for King Edward VI, an independent secondary school in the area. They were relieved to get places for Rishi and Sanjay: the Claughtons, who were also able to secure places for their children, recall it all being ‘a bit of a scramble’, as ‘everyone rushed to Stroud’.
Despite the unexpected upheaval, Sunak quickly settled in his new school, the transition eased by the fact that so many of his Oakmount friends had made the same move.
There were plenty of other boys and girls of a similar heritage, generally children of Asian medics.
Olly Case, a former pupil who was in the same year at the school as Sanjay Sunak – two years below Rishi – and who went on to become a teacher there, describes life at Stroud as ‘idyllic’, saying, ‘There were lovely grounds, not massive, but lovely, with playing fields, woods and a pond. It had a real family atmosphere, and everybody knew each other. It wasn’t a big school, and most children came from professional working parents. The staff were lovely and caring.’
Case remembers that the future Chancellor was quickly identified as a high achiever. 9
He was someone that was talked about; the teachers would say, ‘He’s going to be a Prime Minister.’ I know that because since I started working at the school and have spoken to some of the teachers who taught me, they remember the former deputy head and former head discussed it and thought he’d be the first Asian background Prime Minister and things like that. He was very well regarded, and that was literally something they said about him.
At Stroud, Sunak played hockey, football and cricket. He also took part in athletics, but it was cricket at which he excelled. He became captain of the team and is remembered as a confident batsman and an excellent bowler. Every year, pupils went on a hockey tour, an event that gave rise to a touching act of kindness on the part of Sunak’s parents, towards a boy whose parents appeared to be struggling to meet the cost of the trip.
‘It’s a convoluted story, more about Rishi’s family than Rishi himself,’ Case recalls.
We had a hockey tour every year to Guernsey. Essentially, I didn’t want to go because I’d never been on a plane before so my mum told a little white lie, saying that we couldn’t really afford for me to go – because we all had to pay for the trip. Then the headteacher phoned us up and said that a bunch of parents got together and wanted to pay for us. I was in quite a difficult situation with my family and I think Rishi’s family knew that we had some issues at home.
I remember Rishi’s dad at the airport. He said to me, ‘Oh, there’s a little bit of money left over from everybody who chipped in for you to go, so here’s a little bit of money for spending money for you.’ So he gave me £40 or something as spending money for the hockey tour. It was a collective thing, but I guess potentially they were the 10ones who gave a little bit of extra. I’m presuming they were quite instrumental in it happening. It was Sanjay that was on that trip, but I expect Rishi would have done it when his year group went.
Every year, the school put on a musical: during Sunak’s time, there was Fiddler on the Roof and a production based on various tales by Hans Christian Andersen. Though he did not have starring roles, Sunak seems to have enjoyed treading the boards and is remembered for playing Benjamin in a production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. Case recalls, ‘He would have been in a number of these musicals. He wasn’t one of the big, out at the front, leading types in drama, I guess, but he still enjoyed it.’
He remembers Sunak as a ‘really nice kid, really nice guy, very caring and community involved’. These qualities made Sunak an obvious pick as head boy in his final year, a role which provided some early practice in public speaking, as his duties included giving a small speech at end-of-term assemblies.
In addition to being what Case describes as an ‘all-round good egg’, young Rishi was working hard. His parents were clear: education was everything, and he should apply himself rigorously. ‘My parents’ view was, we should work as hard as we can … That’s an ingrained value in our family. That’s how you provide a better life. That was fundamentally what they believed in,’ Sunak has said.2
Tim Wardle, whose wife is a former Stroud pupil in Rishi’s class, says she and Sunak were ‘the class swots’, adding, ‘She’s never met anyone so competitive. Today, every time we turn on the news, she says, “I can’t believe little Rishi became Chancellor and married a hot billionaire, while I… [voice trails off].”’3
While most Stroud pupils went on to King Edward’s, Yashvir and Usha were aiming higher. They knew their elder son was exceptionally 11bright and were keen to get him into the sort of school that would help him achieve his full potential, both academically and more broadly. They set their sights on Winchester College, not only one of the most famous public schools in the country but also fairly conveniently located for Southampton.
The couple now had three children at private day schools, a huge drain on the family finances. Boarding at Winchester, which cost substantially more than a private day school, would be a significant additional burden. Without the benefit of inherited wealth, it was a stretch, so they encouraged Sunak to try for a scholarship.
At Winchester, these highly competitive awards were not automatically accompanied by a reduction in fees and were more sought after for the academic prestige they conferred. Nonetheless, a scholarship would make a bursary easier to obtain, and so they thought it was worth a try. In a manner that would become a feature of the way he approached challenges in later life, Sunak did everything possible to prepare for what he knew would be an incredibly rigorous set of exams. The scholarship tests – known at Winchester as ‘Election’ – took place over several days. Meanwhile, Yashvir secured a part-time job as an occupational health adviser for John Lewis. This role produced some very welcome extra income, and he would keep it up for two decades. (Thirty years or so later, during the coronavirus crisis, his son would visit a John Lewis store in his capacity as Chancellor of the Exchequer, in an attempt to reassure a nervous public that it was ‘safe to go shopping’ as the lockdown eased. During this visit, Sunak spoke with affection about his father’s old job with the company.)
With so much of the family budget going on the children’s education, holidays were not extravagant. Sunak has recalled happy summers on the Isle of Wight, an easy ferry ride from Southampton, and remains fond of the island. Some days were beach days; others were for 12exploring places like Carisbrooke Castle, the spectacular Needles chalk stacks, which rise thirty metres out of the sea off the island’s westernmost extremity, or Blackgang Chine, the UK’s oldest theme park.
From time to time, the family also went abroad, accepting an invitation to stay at David and Janet Parnell’s holiday apartment in Alcossebre, around an hour’s drive north of Valencia on the eastern coast of Spain. ‘They went several times. We’ve still got the postcards that they left for us there, saying, “Dear Janet, David etc., from Yash, Usha, Rishi, Sanjay and Raakhi, thank you for letting us stay at your apartment,”’ David recalls. ‘They wanted to pay us, but we said, “No, you don’t pay us at all.”’
The apartment complex, about fifteen minutes by bike from the village, had a tennis court, a big draw for Yashvir and Usha, who were both keen players.
Yash and Usha said they were on the tennis court all the time. Tennis was a big deal for them. We’ve got bikes there too, so they would ride into town and back. It’s a very rural, quiet place, and they just went to the beach and played tennis and cycled.
He says that in the end the family always insisted on paying something to cover bills.
Money was not too tight for other modest treats, including trips to watch Southampton Football Club. Yashvir had a season ticket and passed on a love of the club to his elder son, who remains a passionate supporter today. Sunak’s childhood hero was the team’s star player Matt Le Tissier, and he could often be seen sporting a replica of Le Tissier’s No. 7 shirt.
On special occasions, the family would go out to dinner at Yashvir and Usha’s favourite Southampton eatery, an Indian restaurant owned 13by a popular local businessman who had become a close friend. Kuti Miah had moved to Southampton around the same time as Yashvir and Usha were beginning their married life in the city and has known Rishi since he was a baby. A fellow first-generation immigrant – he had moved to the UK from Bangladesh in 1975 and worked as a waiter for years before opening his own restaurant – he met the Sunaks through his then boss, who was one of Yashvir’s patients. He was still working as a waiter when they were first introduced, and a lifelong friendship began.
‘Rishi was probably one and a half months old at the time. They walked in with their baby cot, and it didn’t take me long to get on with him. Then he became my GP,’ Miah says. He too became one of Yashvir’s patients. In 1983, he was diagnosed with tuberculosis and spent three months in hospital. He has never forgotten how Yashvir supported him during what was a difficult and frightening time. ‘He was like a brother to me. Fantastic man,’ he says.
These days, the restaurateur is something of a local celebrity in Southampton, but he arrived in the city with nothing. Having fallen in love with the place, he decided to build a business there, eventually going into partnership with former Southampton FC captain Francis Benali, who along with Le Tissier – another close friend – was a local hero. For some three decades, the Sunaks would go to Miah’s restaurant every Christmas Eve. Recalling Rishi as a child, the father-of-three says he was ‘intelligent, playful and hyper. He would laugh and joke,’ adding that he always knew the young man would go far. ‘I always say I saw lights on Rishi from day one. I’m not saying it because he is famous now – it’s just he’s so charismatic, like his dad. And like his dad, he is a very kind guy.’
Miah’s restaurant business thrived, and he was proud to be able to send his own son to King Edward VI – a decent first division school 14which was the next step for most of Rishi’s year group at Stroud. However, the boy who would become Chancellor was going up a league.
In the event, he had not quite made the grade to enter Winchester as a scholar. His parents had always been realistic about his chances: Stroud did not reckon to send many pupils to the major public schools and getting a scholarship to Winchester – one of the most selective schools in the country – was a big ask of any boy. Tim Johnson, an Old Wykehamist who is a year older than the Chancellor, also sat the scholarship exams and says they were tougher than any other academic test he would take in later life. ‘I failed them as well. They were the hardest exams I’ve ever taken, up to and including my finals. I remember the French oral being done in Senegalese, so not only was it in French, it was also in West African French.’ Nonetheless, Sunak had done well enough in the tests to be offered a regular place. It seems his parents may also have been offered some financial help by the school: he has since said somewhat vaguely that he was ‘helped along the way with support and scholarships here and there’.4
At the time, his achievement in getting in to such an elite establishment was quite a talking point among teachers and fellow pupils at Stroud. ‘Not many kids get into Winchester, which is why I remember that he did. It is quite a rarity,’ recalls Olly Case.
To get in, you have to be well above normal ability across the board, really. You have to take numerous exams. Whilst a lot of people were trying to get into other selective schools, Stroud has always been and still remains a school that really looks at the whole child and makes sure they are prepared for whatever is next. It’s not just a hothouse for kids to pass exams. And Rishi wasn’t your stereotypical, nerdy, good-at-books type – he was more rounded than that; a lot more personable.
15The year was 1993 and Sunak had just turned thirteen. For the Conservative government of the time, these were dark days indeed. Re-elected in 1992 with a majority of just twenty-one, John Major’s administration had lurched from crisis to crisis, from the storm over the Maastricht Treaty through Black Wednesday, when the UK was forced to withdraw from the Exchange Rate Mechanism following a run on the pound. The Prime Minister was in office, but, as his former Chancellor of the Exchequer Norman Lamont would cuttingly declare, there was little sense that he was in power. In summer 1993, Major staggered through an unofficial vote of confidence in his leadership, and the Maastricht Treaty was finally ratified, but his troubles were far from over. The beleaguered premier was about to make a new rod for his own back with his notorious ‘back to basics’ initiative. Before long, the phrase would be uttered only with derision, as it emerged – in toe-curling detail – that the values he was attempting to promote were not being upheld by a string of senior figures in his own Cabinet.
It seems unlikely that Sunak was much interested in these political dramas. His parents were not politically active and there is no evidence that they were even very interested in current affairs. In any case, Sunak had more typically teenage concerns, not least because he was about to embark on a new life, as a boarder at one of Britain’s finest public schools.16
Notes
1 ‘The Rishi Sunak One’, Political Thinking with Nick Robinson, 11 October 2019
2 Ibid.
3 Twitter, 9 April 2020, @ttwardle
4 ‘The Rishi Sunak One’, Political Thinking with Nick Robinson, 11 October 2019
CHAPTER 2
TEENAGE KICKS
According to his sister Rachel, at the age of four Boris Johnson expressed the hope that he would grow up to be ‘world king’. Eton College, where the future premier went to school, prided itself on turning out supremely confident young men and would not have discouraged such lofty aspirations. It had, after all, produced no fewer than eighteen Prime Ministers by the time Johnson took up his place, a record of which it was fiercely proud.
By contrast, Winchester College, the school Yashvir and Usha Sunak chose for their sons, has always been more interested in intellectual ability. It is the alma mater of only one Prime Minister, Henry Addington, who entered Downing Street more than two centuries ago (but five pre-Sunak Chancellors: Addington, Lowe, Cripps, Gaitskell and, most recently, Howe). Nevertheless, it takes great satisfaction in always beating Eton in academic league tables. Unlike some public schools, it is simply not accessible to the ‘rich but thick’ and every boy who makes it through the rigorous entrance exams joins a ferociously bright community. The world Sunak entered as a nervous thirteen-year-old was – in the words of one former pupil – ‘intellectually arrogant’, and from the moment he arrived it would have been clear to him that he was going to have to work hard to compete.
Tim Johnson, who was in the year above him at Winchester, says: 18
If Eton’s problem is generally social arrogance, then Winchester’s is intellectual arrogance. What you get told an awful lot – if not spelled out then implicitly – is that by being there, you’re among the very brightest of your cohort. But you also know very quickly that you’re not the brightest in the room, because there is always someone cleverer than you. Whether that gives you arrogance and humility at the same time, I don’t know. Stereotypes are always tricky, because they’re true in part and they are stereotypes for a reason, but they don’t tell the whole story. The Wykehamist stereotype is much more about being good at being clever than being good at being popular. Someone like Boris Johnson would have found it much harder to bluff through Winchester than he found it to bluff through Eton, I think. The premium is on intelligence not social skills.
It is not hard to imagine how daunting it must have been for the young teenager as his parents dropped him off at his boarding house with an enormous trunk packed with his new school uniform and belongings to begin a new life. The grandeur of the medieval buildings and the sheer size of the place – there are some 650 boys – must have added to the sense that he was stepping into a very different world from his relaxed little prep school. What made the transition considerably easier was the traditional house system, which is at the heart of the way Winchester College functions. It is designed to create an extended family, in which new boys have plenty of support from teachers and older pupils and form lifelong friendships.
Had he won a scholarship, Sunak would have been in College, the original fourteenth-century boarding house that overlooks the medieval courtyard. This is home to around seventy boys of exceptional academic talent, whose distinguished status is underlined by the wearing of gowns over their school uniform. Instead, he was placed in a 19boarding house called Trant’s, though its official name was Bramston’s (after its founder and first housemaster, Reverend John Trant Bramston). On arrival, he would have been shown to his dormitory and his study, a private space where he would do his prep and could escape from the bustle of the boarding house.
Home to about sixty boys aged thirteen to eighteen, Trant’s had its own squash court, music room and large recreation room with snooker and pool tables. In a system that differs from that of most boarding schools, which have central dining facilities, boys at Winchester take all their meals in their houses, an arrangement that is designed to encourage friendships across age groups and enhance the sense of belonging. Thrown together in this way, new boys were unlikely to feel lonely for long and quickly learned to mix with pupils from a variety of backgrounds.
Many fiercely academic schools begin preparing pupils for GCSEs from the moment they arrive, but the attitude to public exams at Winchester College is different. Proud as it has always been of its exam results, the school refuses to be constrained by the curriculum. Far from encouraging pupils to sit as many exams as possible, it does not even bother entering pupils for some subjects. According to Tim Johnson, in Sunak’s day the school ‘didn’t rate GCSEs very highly’ and there was no pressure on the most able pupils to sit subjects to rack up extra A grades. ‘We hardly took any GCSEs,’ he explains. ‘For example, we didn’t do history, we didn’t do English literature – we didn’t do a lot of the generic ones.’ When it came to A-levels, the school was so confident in pupils’ ability to do well that instead of spending two years teaching to the curriculum, they covered it in just one, devoting the first year of sixth form to educational material that would not form part of the exams but was nonetheless indirectly relevant.
Johnson describes the overall set up as ‘very academic’, with pupils 20‘rigidly’ divided into sets according to ability. As at Eton College, exam marks were publicly displayed, an approach that fuelled intense competition. Pupils all knew their place in the pecking order. ‘Everyone knows where everyone else sits in the academic hierarchy,’ Johnson says.
The teenage Sunak is remembered as a ‘joiner’ who threw himself into everything the school had to offer and made friends easily. ‘He was a nice, unpretentious, un-difficult person; a good chap, always pleasant and polite,’ recalls another Old Wykehamist.
Sports-wise, he was up against keener competition than he had been at Stroud, and though he was still a strong cricketer, he only made the Thirds. Sport was compulsory until sixth form and he was required to participate in various inter-house competitions, where, being fit and athletic, he did not let the side down. Probably to his relief, since he was very slight and shorter than most of his peers, there was no rugby. Instead, pupils played a complicated game unique to the school called Winchester College football. Otherwise known among pupils as ‘Winkies’, ‘WinCoFo’ or just ‘Our Game’, it was played in the spring term (known as ‘Common Time’ at Winchester) and had evolved considerably over the years. In the nineteenth century, the game was played in the town centre, with two teams attempting to move a football from one end of Kingsgate Street to the other. Part of the fun had been that there were not many rules governing how this objective was achieved, but the merry chaos seems to have resulted in too many broken windows. To reduce the collateral damage, the pitch was later relocated to a more isolated spot. Probably in response to the number of injuries arising from some of the strong-arm methods used to force the ball from one end of the pitch to another, new rules were introduced. Over time, the game evolved into a kind of football–rugby hybrid, with teams of fifteen including eight forwards known as ‘hotmen’, who operate like 21a rugby scrum. Sunak enjoyed the game and was sufficiently good at it to represent his house.
Sunak has described his time at Winchester College as ‘absolutely marvellous’. He was evidently very happy; the only downer was probably weekends, which could be painfully dull. Pupils had lessons on a Saturday morning, typically followed by some sort of sports fixture in the afternoon, and the day would pass easily enough. It was Sundays that were the challenge. They would begin with chapel, which, being a Church of England service, was not compulsory for pupils of other faiths. Sunak did not attend. (Weekday chapel services were less overtly religious assemblies and would not have jarred so much with Sunak’s Hindu upbringing. He enjoyed these assemblies and sometimes talks of Winchester College Chapel as his favourite church in the UK.) Then there was little to do for the rest of the day. ‘God, it was boring,’ Johnson recalls. ‘That’s why people played sixteen hours of piano practice or took four baths.’
For A-level, Sunak chose English literature, economics and maths. He also took AS-levels in biology and French. His parents were not entirely convinced by this selection. ‘They’re kind of classic Indian immigrant parents. They go do a degree that leads to a very specific job, and then have security of income – that was their driving mindset,’ Sunak has said. ‘When I said I was going to study economics at A-level, that was something my mother was very worried about, because it was not obvious what job that would lead to, in her mind.’1
Nonetheless, economics quickly became his favourite class. He has described it as ‘absolutely my major academic love’, adding, ‘I was so excited to start studying that at sixteen.’
For English literature he recalls having ‘two amazing teachers’ to guide him through set texts which included Paradise Lost by the seventeenth-century poet John Milton and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, 22both of which he thought ‘brilliant’. ‘As well as teaching us English, they combined it with teaching us a little bit about the history of the era as well. Which was really great, it just really brings it to life … But economics was my major nerdy passion,’ he would later recall, in an interview with pupils at a school in his constituency.2
Another class he enjoyed was known as ‘Div’. Unique to Winchester – though Eton College and doubtless a number of other public schools had something similar – it was not an A-level subject. Sunak has described it as ‘lots of different subjects all in one’. Pupils could study anything from black holes to current affairs, meditation and art history – ‘You name it … Every year, you have a different person [to teach it] and they could teach you whatever they wanted … No exams, and you could just have a really interesting chat about lots of different things. That was one of my favourite things,’ he has said.3
* * *
Winchester College liked to treat pupils as if they were young men, not children, an aspect of the culture that Sunak particularly appreciated. As we have seen, his parents had encouraged him to work hard from a very young age, a discipline that was gently, but firmly, reinforced. Now he was at boarding school, he had to manage his own time, which he believes was one of the most valuable skills he acquired. ‘Probably the most important thing there is independence and self-motivation,’ he has said, reflecting on the most important things he learned during these years.
It was really teaching you to be able to just figure out your own life a bit … Homework was not ‘here it is today, hand it in tomorrow’. It was much more ‘here’s all the stuff you need to do for next week’ – you 23kind of organise your own time and figure out when you’re going to do it … You can’t get your parents to help you with everything, so it teaches you that independence and that self-motivation. That’s probably the biggest kind of life lesson.4
Liberation from parental supervision at boarding schools can create scope for mischief-making, particularly in relation to alcohol and cigarettes. The most senior pupils were allowed to buy a limited amount of beer at a sixth form club and seem to have been able to get away with drinking quite a lot. As long as they returned to their boarding houses before curfew and managed to sign themselves in, they would not get into trouble.
This relatively laid-back approach must have presented significant temptations. However, Sunak seems to have stayed firmly on the straight and narrow. While the Hindu faith does not prohibit the consumption of alcohol, and Sunak’s father enjoys an occasional glass of red wine, the young Rishi simply did not like the taste or effect of alcohol – and never would. A friend says, ‘Rish tried lots of different types of alcohol growing up, but it just never really appealed. His friends kept encouraging him to, but it’s just not his thing.’
Such abstinence cannot have made the periodic discos with girls from neighbouring schools any easier. Even for the most confident boys these were awkward events, involving busloads of teenage girls suddenly descending on single-sex boarding houses for what Johnson describes as a ‘strictly policed dance’. The girls were either trucked in from St Swithin’s, a nearby boarding school, or from a sixth form college called Peter Symonds, which had strong links with the older Winchester. The artifice of these social occasions did not diminish the excitement they generated, particularly among those who benefited from Dutch courage. 24
While more daring boys were sneaking spirits into the school and occasionally experimenting with illicit drugs (though Winchester was not known to have much of a drug problem), it seems the naughtiest thing Sunak ever did at Winchester College was to smuggle a handheld television into the school so that he did not miss any key games of Euro ’96. The contest took place in England that June, around the time he was finishing his GCSEs, and, along with the rest of the nation, the teenage Sunak was swept up in the excitement. ‘It was a big deal, because we hadn’t had a big football tournament in England for a very long time,’ he has recalled.
We had this great song, ‘Football’s Coming Home’ … [A friend and I] had managed to smuggle into school some kind of old hand-held TV; this chunky thing with a big aerial that you could receive a TV signal from, but which obviously didn’t work brilliantly … During the time when we were meant to be doing our homework in the evening, he and I nipped up to the top of the school, this attic, to go and watch TV … There was some England game, someone had scored, and we were jumping up and down, singing. It was like a scene from a movie: we were totally absorbed in the moment – and then obviously turned round and standing at the doorway was our teacher, who was nonplussed … He’d already busted us once a few days before, and told us to take this thing home, which we obviously didn’t listen to. We were in full embrace, screaming and shouting ‘Three Lions’.5
It was around this time that Sunak first experienced racism. It had never been an issue in the relatively affluent neighbourhood in which he grew up, nor reared its ugly head in any of the schools he attended, where there were many ethnic minority pupils. He has said that 25broadly speaking, it was not something he had to endure. However, he has never forgotten one incident, which took place when he was out with Sanjay and Raakhi.
‘I was probably a mid-teenager,’ he has said.
We were out at a fast food restaurant, and I was just looking after them. There were people sitting nearby who – it was the first time I’d experienced it – were just saying some very unpleasant things. The ‘P’ word … And it stung. I still remember it; it’s seared in my memory. You can be insulted in many different ways … but that stings in a way that’s hard to explain really. Particularly because my little sister was quite young, as was my brother. I just took them away, and just removed ourselves from the situation.6
Shocking as it was, he put it down to experience, and rightly did not allow it to give him any sense of inferiority.
Now the children were growing up, Usha had more time on her hands. In the mid-1990s, after years of working as a locum, she decided to set up her own pharmacy. She bought a somewhat dilapidated premises a couple of miles from Spindlewood Close, on Burgess Road, and set to work smartening it up. By then, neighbour David Parnell had retired from his job as an oil drilling engineer with Shell and he started to help her out by delivering prescriptions to local care homes.
I used to do Usha’s deliveries for her when she had the pharmacy. She’d give me a list. She paid me peanuts, but I was happy to help her out – she is a lovely girl. She bought the pharmacy when it wasn’t in a very good state, and bashed it into shape.
Another former neighbour in the close says (affectionately) that Mrs 26Sunak was always regaling customers with her children’s achievements. ‘You couldn’t get out of Usha’s pharmacy for her telling you how well they were doing!’ she recalls.
During school holidays, Sunak would support his mother’s fledgling business. He helped with the accounts and book-keeping, a role that fostered a growing political awareness. Seeing how fiscal policy affected company profits, he began taking an interest in fluctuations in National Insurance and VAT rates and paying attention to what the main political parties were saying about tax and spending. He was also becoming increasingly conscious of the importance of the role his parents played in the local community in their capacities as a doctor and a pharmacist. He admired what they were doing and began thinking about how he might live up to the example they had set.
This was an exciting time to become interested in politics as the Conservative administration entered its death throes. After eighteen long years, the party was exhausted and divided, while Labour was surging into the ascendancy under its charismatic new leader, Tony Blair. As the seminal 1997 general election approached, Sunak devoured the news and comment pages in national newspapers.
It was not, however, a fashionable time for young people to be Tories, even in public schools. Tim Johnson describes it as ‘the less comfortable intellectual position to take’ at that time, even at Winchester College. Nonetheless, the Conservatives were the party with which Sunak identified most. For all its troubles, he felt it still represented the aspirational values he espoused: hard work not hand-outs; the crucial importance of education; and the primacy of the individual over the state. He has said that he felt that the Conservative Party were ‘kind of on the side’ of people like his parents, who had poured everything into creating a better life for themselves and their children.
Sunak was just shy of seventeen when Major went to the country 27in May 1997, having put off the day of reckoning until the last possible moment. Nationally, Labour was some twenty points ahead in the polls, but in Winchester, the Liberal Democrats were the main threat to the Tory incumbent, Gerry Malone. Though the Conservatives had held the seat since 1950, he was under intense pressure from Lib Dem candidate Mark Oaten. Sunak briefly got involved, helping out with some leafleting. On the night of an election that would topple 178 Tory MPs, including, in one of the most memorable moments, Defence Secretary Michael Portillo, Sunak settled down in his boarding house to watch the BBC’s Election Night special. Keeping one eye on Peter Snow’s swingometer, which showed the unfolding results with dramatic visual representations of the country turning from blue to red, he was also writing a piece for the school magazine.
The results were only beginning to come in, but jubilant crowds had already gathered outside Blair’s home, waving Union Jacks. Sunak considered this display of national pride ‘ironic’, on the grounds that a Labour landslide was certain to be bad for Britain. Labour supporters up and down the country would soon be singing along to D-Ream’s ‘Things Can Only Get Better’, but he was sure they were about to get worse. In his magazine article, he acknowledged that the Tories deserved to lose, writing that ‘nobody elects a divided party’ or rewards ‘weak leadership, sleaze, a poorly run campaign’. However, he did not accept that Labour deserved to win. In a long essay, he warned of looming tax rises and criticised the Labour Party’s refusal to commit to keep spending below 40 per cent of GDP. Quoting a piece in the Daily Mail, he attacked what he described as Blair’s ‘discredited belief’ that ‘state training schemes, not entrepreneurialism’ created jobs and expressed concern that trade union ‘brothers’ Blair had strategically cold-shouldered would soon begin to flex their muscles.
Sunak’s article is remarkably sophisticated for a sixteen-year-old 28and offers a detailed insight into his political thinking at a tender age. Musing on how a New Labour administration would evolve, he was prescient about the likelihood of the hard left returning to the fore, correctly predicting that ‘slowly but surely the Labourites of Old will emerge and make their voice more strongly felt. Tony Benn, Margaret Beckett, Robin Cook, Jack Straw and most importantly of all John Prescott might well become fed up of Tony Blair’s centre-right concessions after a while,’ he wrote. With the exception of Jack Straw, who never seemed uneasy about the party’s shift to the centre, and perhaps Margaret Beckett, who never gave the new leader any trouble, all of those he named would in due course struggle with the new direction of the party, just as he had anticipated.
In two further accurate predictions, he suggested Peter Mandelson was likely to lose control of ‘the [New Labour] project’ (the spin doctor resigned eighteen months later, in 1998, following revelations of an undisclosed home loan from Paymaster General Geoffrey Robinson); and that the media would quickly become interested in Labour sleaze (the first scandal came just six months later, over a £1 million donation to the party from Formula 1 chief Bernie Ecclestone which was made public after the government had announced that Formula 1 would be exempt from a ban on tobacco advertising). Though these observations were not particularly original – the article drew from secondary sources including The Times and The Spectator – Sunak’s arguments were well crafted and revealed certain political positions, particularly on the EU, that he never changed. Aged sixteen, he was already clearly Eurosceptic and fearful of the creation of a European ‘Super State’, voicing concern that New Labour rhetoric sounded ‘worryingly pro-Europe’ and noting that ‘avid pro-Europeans’ were already being sent to Brussels.
At the same time, he had no truck with the ‘knee-jerk, overdone Euroscepticism’ of figures like John Redwood, arguing that the latter 29was as much to blame for the Tory Party’s downfall as Europhile Ken Clarke. This measured Euroscepticism was exactly what he would display almost two decades later, as a referendum on the UK’s membership of the EU approached.
More controversially, at sixteen, Sunak bitterly opposed Labour’s proposed minimum wage and the introduction of the Working Time Directive, lambasting these measures as ‘proven job-destroyers’. Today, it is hard to find any Conservatives who remain hostile to the minimum wage, but the position was quite common among Tories at the time. Sunak also believed public sector pensions would eventually ‘bankrupt Britain’.
Writing about what lay ahead for the Conservatives, he listed the strengths and weaknesses of various potential leadership contenders, seeming impressed by William Hague. The party needed to be ‘revitalised and modernised under someone young’, he said.
On the morning of 2 May 1997, Blair entered Downing Street with a majority of 179 seats. The Tories had been reduced to a rump, in their worst general election performance since 1906.
In Winchester, the election result had been too close to call and there had been no fewer than three nail-biting counts. In the end, Malone lost his seat by just two votes. Adamant that he had been robbed, the Tory launched High Court proceedings, claiming that fifty-five ballot papers had been wrongly excluded from the total because they had not been correctly security stamped. A court accepted his argument and the result was subsequently declared void. In a by-election later that year, Malone expected to regain the seat. However, in a sign of the depth of the crisis engulfing the Conservative Party, Oaten was returned to Westminster with a majority of more than 21,500 – leaving the Tory candidate with more than a little egg on his face.
Having leafleted for Malone, Sunak followed the drama with interest, 30but his A-levels were looming. Fascinating as the political landscape was, academically he could not afford to take his foot off the gas. His time at Winchester was drawing to a close, and he needed brilliant results. With excellent predictions, he had decided to apply for Oxford to read philosophy, politics and economics (PPE). The college he selected was Lincoln, where, beating intense competition for a place on one of the most prestigious courses at one of the most sought-after colleges at Oxford, he was offered a conditional place.
Though he had not been a scholar at Winchester, his intelligence, self-confidence and easy charm, along with his enthusiasm for all the school had to offer, had consistently impressed. It was no surprise to his peers when he was appointed ‘Sen. Co. Prae’, meaning head boy.
Explaining Winchester’s unusual head boy system, a friend says:
The way it works at Winchester is that there are two head boys. One is known as Aul. Prae – Head of House from the scholars’ House (called ‘College’). That person is Aul. Prae all year. But the main Head of School is Sen. Co. Prae and they change each term – meaning that there are three in total in any given year. Rish was Sen. Co. Prae for the first term – chosen by the Heads of Houses at all the other ten-plus houses at Winchester.
As we have seen, he had also been head boy at his prep school – an impressive record suggesting a consistency in leadership qualities and good character.
On his eighteenth birthday, Sunak received a card signed by the entire Southampton football team – a gift that became one of his most prized possessions. Southampton would always be home, and this would always be his team. He was about to venture out into the world, however – beginning in the city of dreaming spires.
Notes
1 ‘Robert Colvile in Conversation with Rishi Sunak MP’, Centre for Policy Studies, 29 September 2019
2 The George Podcast, 18 October 2019
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid.
6 ‘The Rishi Sunak One’, Political Thinking with Nick Robinson, 11 October 2019
CHAPTER 3
THE AIRPORT TEST
I
