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One of the many unlikely knock-on effects of Liz Truss’s ultra-brief time as prime minister is the fact that when her successor walks into No 10, the political obituaries that calmly wrote him off as the nearly man of modern UK politics will be just seven weeks old.
Had Boris Johnson successfully returned it would have been viewed, with reason, as an extraordinary and unprecedented comeback. But in some ways Rishi Sunak’s career resurrection has been just as unlikely.
Sunak’s loss to Truss in a vote of Tory members announced on 5 September was not crushing, at 57% to 43%. But the moment the contest moved from Conservative MPs to the party rank and file, he never once looked like winning.
As defeat edged closer, Sunak was cast as the Michael Heseltine of 2020s politics: like Margaret Thatcher’s would-be nemesis, a longtime frontrunner who fatally damaged his cause by agitating to remove the incumbent, in Sunak’s case by resigning as Johnson’s chancellor.
He appeared finished and effectively vanished from view, last speaking in the Commons the day after Truss became PM. Unnamed allies predicted he could tire of Westminster life and move with his family to their home in California, resuming a finance career.
So what changed? In the simplest terms, as Sunak mulled over his options the political environment around him changed dramatically, and to his great advantage.
Just as Sunak had predicted in a series of hustings events over the summer, Truss’s programme of largely unfunded tax cuts did frighten investors. Similarly, the day after she entered Downing Street, Truss agreed to the sort of energy bailout Sunak had spent weeks urging her to adopt.
Most crucially of all, as the Truss programme for government collapsed around her and Tory poll numbers dropped below 20%, for perhaps the first time since the Brexit referendum in 2016 Conservative MPs appeared to lose their appetite for chaos.
And Sunak was ready. He gathered most of the same team around him who had fought the summer campaign, led by the former Tory party chair Oliver Dowden.
