Britain's Rishi Sunak battles missteps as he tries to push Tories ahead of election

LONDON British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has presented himself as thorough and evidence-based throughout his relatively brief political career, but there has always been a nagging question about the acuity of his political antenna.

The electoral campaign of the last five weeks has clearly shown that he does not have the instinctive side of some of his predecessors, such as Tony Blair or Boris Johnson.

Sunak's campaign has suffered several missteps since he announced the July 4 election date in pouring rain end of May, notably the suspension of candidates mired in a scandal linked to betting on the date of the election a week later Labor Party leader Keir Starmer urged him to do so.

The biggest mistake that led him to apologize was his decision to leave the commemorations of the 80th anniversary of D-Day in the north of France on June 6 earlier than planned.

Critics said the decision to skip the international event which closed the commemorations showed a lack of respect for veterans and diminished the UK's international standing. Other world leaders, including President Joe Biden, French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy, were all in attendance. As is Starmer, who is the favorite to replace Sunak as Prime Minister.

Since then, Sunak has failed to lift his Conservative Party's poll numbers, which have been depressed in recent years due to the actions of his two immediate predecessors.

First of all, Johnson was forced to stop after being put on trial for lying to Parliament about breaches of coronavirus lockdown measures at his Downing Street offices. Then confidence in the Tories collapsed during the chaotic and traumatic 49 days of Liz Truss's leadership, including the unfunded tax cuts financial markets in turmoil and pushed up borrowing costs.

Opinion polls suggest the Conservatives are at risk of losing power for the first time in 14 years.

The Conservatives badly needed to give leader Sunaks an endorsement boost, otherwise their leader-centric campaign risks reinforcing weakness rather than strengthening strength, said Rob Ford, a political scientist at the University of Manchester . However, Sunak's clumsy and error-strewn campaign completely failed to tip the balance of approval among the leaders.

It must be said that Sunak is not the most experienced campaigner. He has only been an MP since 2015 and he has never played a significant role, let alone on the front line, in a general election campaign.

Sunak became Prime Minister in October 2022 when he presented himself as a steady pair of hands to replace Truss. He reminded voters that he had warned Conservative Party members about the recklessness of Truss' economic plan when he challenged her to succeed Johnson.

I was right then, when I warned about Liz Truss,” he said. “That's why you can all trust me now.

In replacing Truss after an uncontested leadership battle, Sunak became Britain's first leader of color, the first Hindu to become prime minister and, at 42, the youngest leader in more than 200 years.

Sunak, now 44, has enjoyed a rapid rise to the top of the Tory ranks. He came out of nowhere four years ago to become Treasury chief on the eve of the coronavirus pandemic.

In a matter of weeks, he had to unveil the largest program of economic support that a Chancellor of the Exchequer had ever had to implement outside of war.

Wise, confident and comfortable with the march of modern technology, he was nicknamed Dishy Rishi and quickly became one of the most trusted and popular faces within Johnson's administration during the rigors of the pandemic.

As Treasury chief, Sunak was praised for rolling out a COVID-19 job retention scheme that arguably saved millions of jobs. But this has come at a cost, as the country's tax burden has reached its highest level since the 1940s.

It's not something he's particularly comfortable with. Sunak is instinctively a low-tax, small-state politician who idolizes former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

During his 20 months as prime minister, Sunak struggled to contain bitter divisions within his Conservative party. One camp wants him to be much tougher on immigration and bolder in cutting taxes, while another urges him to place himself more at the center of politics, the space where, historically, British elections are won.

Sunak was born in 1980 in Southampton, on the south coast of England, to parents of Indian origin who were both born in East Africa. His father was a family doctor and his mother ran a pharmacy, where he often helped with the accounts.

He described how his parents saved to send him to Winchester College, one of the most expensive boarding schools in Britain. He then went to Oxford University to study politics, philosophy and economics, the degree of choice for future prime ministers.

He then earned an MBA at Stanford University, which proved to be a launching pad for his later career as a hedge fund manager at Goldman Sachs in the United States. It was there that he met his wife, Akshata Murty, the daughter of the billionaire founder of the Indian technology giant. Infosys. They have two daughters.

The couple are the richest residents of 10 Downing Street, according to the Sunday Times Rich List 2024, with an estimated fortune of 651 million pounds ($815 million). They are even richer than King Charles III, a level of wealth than Labor leader Starmer This makes Sunak disconnected from the realities and daily struggles of workers.

With his fortune secure, Sunak was elected to Parliament for the Conservative seat of Richmond in Yorkshire in 2015. During the UK's Brexit referendum in 2016, he supported leaving the European Union. When permission was unexpectedly obtained, Sunak experienced a meteoric rise that quickly took him to Downing Street.

He's not used to losing.