AGAINST THE TIDE

By Siddhartha Tripathy

The last mile is always the hardest. Rishi Sunak must be realising the profundity of this phrase most intensely at this stage of his run to be the first person of Indian origin to be the Prime Minister of Britain.

The 42-year-old got off to a flying start last month after he resigned as the British Chancellor of the Exchequer due to his differences with then Prime Minister Boris Johnson and went on to comfortably win the parliamentary stage of the race to Conservative Party leadership.

Even a year ago, he was a firm favourite to be the next Tory leader. With his rise from the fringes of Britain’s political scene to the second most powerful Cabinet post in the British government, all within a span of a decade, Sunak looked virtually unstoppable. This had not changed despite the tax row surrounding his entrepreneur wife, Akshata Murthy, the daughter of Infosys co-founder Narayana Murthy.

Although it was common knowledge that Sunak may not be able to sail through the second stage of the contest – a postal ballot of 200,000-plus grassroots Conservative members – as smoothly, his supporters had perhaps never imagined the extent of the uphill battle he would face in coming weeks.

The way things stand today, even though Conservative Party leadership results are a couple of weeks away, a victory for his opponent – UK foreign secretary Liz Truss – seems all but assured.

Earlier this month a popular opinion poll, in which a significantly high number of Conservative members took part, showed that Truss was the preferred choice for the party’s leadership and the successor of Johnson as the British prime minister.

The survey by YouGov for the Times, UK saw Truss opening up a whopping 34-point lead over Sunak, which meant that she had the support of more than two-thirds of the Conservative party’s members.

Many other independent surveys and polls over the past days have indicated that Truss is not only ahead of Sunak but is stretching her lead.

So, what is it that is not quite working out for Sunak? Is his historical ethnic background (Sunak’s grandparents had migrated from India to East Africa before reaching the shores of the UK) and present Indian connection coming in the way of his prospect of assuming Britain’s most powerful post? Or is it his privileged upbringing and personal wealth that is casting apprehensions about his ability to connect with the nation’s middle-class majority?

Some political experts are of the view that Sunak’s stint as the Chancellor – a period that saw taxes in the UK reach a 40-year-high, hurting the working class the most – has come back to haunt him at a time when he is promising the nation about cutting down taxes.

Others say that at a time when Britain is going through a cost-of-living crisis and the protracted aftermath of Brexit, Sunak’s talks about the dire need for fiscal responsibility are not matching up well against Truss’s messages that are laden with simplistic solutions to the nation’s problems and laced with unbridled optimism about better days ahead.

In a recent interview with the BBC, Sunak said he “would rather lose than win on a false promise”.

In an opinion piece for The Times, a British newspaper, he wrote: “People need reassurance now about what we will do and I make no apology for concentrating on what matters most. Because whatever the ‘boosterish’ talk of others, you can’t heat your home with hope.”

Given that 90 percent of the Conservative party members have made up their minds about who they want to be the leader of their party and nation, Sunak will certainly need to heat up his campaign – in other words, he must somehow give it a boost – if he has any hope of turning the tide back in his favour.

Needless to say, he will have to put up the fight of his life in this last mile.