Rishi Sunak

Meet the chancellor: the real Rishi Sunak, by the people who know him best

Before the burnish-filter Instagram shots, before GQ devoted a page to the cut of his lapel, before he autographed – like a quality-control stamp – his Treasury policies on Covid, even before the frenzy at his every utterance, like it was the Fonz up there on the afternoon press conference podium, and not the chancellor of the exchequer, there was a moment when Rishi Sunak was nervous.

It was late November. He had been chosen to stand in for Boris Johnson during a seven-way TV election debate on the BBC. Inside Westminster, it was a move that fanned the persistent rumours that Dominic Cummings, the PM’s chief adviser, wanted him to replace Sajid Javid as chancellor. In the country, no one had really heard of him. Sunak’s answer to this pressure? Call Amber Rudd. The former home secretary had stood in for Theresa May during the 2017 election debates. “He told me en passant that he’d watched all the debates,” Rudd says. “He’d done his research. And he said that I was very good, and I was flattered. And so I gave him advice, tips, and then I said, ‘Of course, you have to go off-script sometimes.’ And he said, ‘Yeah.’ Then, ‘No. I’m not going to do that.’ ”

And he didn’t. He stayed on message, on brand. He made Cummings happy, he made Johnson happy, he made Isaac Levido – the baby-faced, bearded hipster running the Conservative campaign – happy. And in February this year, when Javid resigned after losing a power struggle with Cummings, Sunak found himself elevated to the second most powerful job in government. He had been an MP for less than five years. It is one of the fastest ascents in political history. It reminded everybody of another politician with a fast ascent: Tony Blair. Now the expectations are high indeed. Blair won three elections for Labour. Is he the future of the Tory party?

read the full article on The Times