Sunak as PM? He’d better not wait till the chickens come home to roost
Rishi Sunak is the Covid chancellor. Few outside of Westminster had heard of him when he replaced Sajid Javid in the role in early 2020, but since then he has spent two years in charge of the government’s economic response to the pandemic. Now, as restrictions are lifted, he is the bookies’ favourite to replace Boris Johnson if the prime minister is forced to quit over ‘partygate’. It is a meteoric rise.
Since the second world war, only three former Conservative chancellors have made it to 10 Downing Street, and one of them, Winston Churchill, had left the Treasury more than a decade before the exceptional circumstances of 1940 won him the premiership.
Indeed, the list of postwar prime ministers Britain never had includes a long list of chancellors – both Conservative and Labour. Rab Butler, Roy Jenkins, Denis Healey and Ken Clarke were all big beasts that didn’t make it to the top job, suggesting the Treasury is not always the best government department to be running if you want to make and keep friends.
In the early part of the pandemic, Sunak’s political stock rose as quickly as one of Wall Street’s must-have technology stocks. It wasn’t just that he seemed to know what he was doing; what he was doing – spraying the economy with money – was popular. Not many chancellors say money’s no object, which was Sunak’s message when the economy went into its first lockdown.
In truth, he had no choice. Shutting people up in their homes in late March 2020 caused the economy to shrink by a quarter in just two months; without the furlough scheme and a variety of business support measures the damage would have been not just massive but permanent. There are times, normally when things are looking really bad, when the British state
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