If I were Rishi Sunak, I would resign immediately. I say this not only because I disapprove of his politics, but out of a selfless devotion to his well-being. Here is a man with billions in the bank who is about to spend the next few years slaving away in a cramped London office trying to resolve problems of breath-taking intractability, only to provoke the hatred of half the nation. Why not take the money and run?
The obvious answer — that he has never shrunk from a challenge, feels a keen sense of responsibility to the country and wishes to serve its people — is the kind of thing that politicians read off autocues. It is like declaring that there are brighter days ahead, that actions speak louder than words, or that we should stop brooding over the past (including what happened 10 days ago) and look to the future. If Sunak could best serve the nation by working as an anonymous official in a dingy back room in Basildon, would he do so? I’m not convinced.
Our new Prime Minister is in Downing Street chiefly because he is hungry for power, like most of the place’s previous inhabitants. It’s not that Sunak is power-mad, but that power can itself be a form of madness. What sane human being would prefer supervising the decline of an increasingly inconsiderable offshore island to permanently sunbathing in the Cayman Islands? Boris Johnson’s cronies spouted similar guff when they claimed that in withdrawing from the contest he was putting the country before himself. They were talking about our most resplendent example of a Hobbesian man, powered purely by self-interest. Johnson is no more likely to put the nation before himself than he is to glue himself to the M6.
Perhaps Sunak believes that he can unify the country. Almost everyone is in favour of unity, just as almost everyone is in favour of freedom, happiness, nurses, chocolate truffles and Billy Connolly. Nobody casts a vote for the Disunity Party. But one should be wary of what almost everybody approves of. Unity is not a virtue in itself, as the German people learnt to their cost when the Nazis came to power. Plato disapproved of tragedy because it enhanced our sense of the individual’s apartness, thus undermining the cohesion of the state. Unity means trying to weld conflicting interests together — but in whose interests?
There is something fundamentally dishonest about the call to drop your differences and rally around a leader. Either the differences are real, in which case they won’t just disappear; or if they can be dropped as easily as that, they probably weren’t worth much in the first place. It’s not as though one is dealing simply with minor shades of difference. If politics is to be more than a game, it must engage interests which go all the way down, to the point where they form part of one’s identity. And you can’t abandon these just because you’re doing badly in the polls. You can say you do, of course, but that’s different. It’s a matter of biting your tongue, not changing your heart.
Behind the idea of discarding your interests overnight lies a particular view of human beings. On this theory, interests are really external to the self. You can shop around among them as in a boutique, trying on one after another. There’s the little red Marxist number, the sky-blue Tory one, the saffron Buddhist robe, the scruffy black leather existentialist jacket and so on. You don’t have to commit yourself to any of them for good. Sinéad O’Connor tried on the Catholic priest outfit for a few weeks before throwing it out, while Madonna has been through the entire shop more times than anyone can count. A few weeks ago, there were Tory politicians who were fervent Trussites in the morning, ardent Johnsonians around lunchtime and devout Sunakians in the evening.
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