Second paragraph of third chapter:

The episode [Gavin Williamson’s resignation] revealed from the outset quite how thin the ice was. Over twelve years of government a sizeable arsenal of unexploded bombs had accumulated beneath the surface, each threatening the new government’s shaky footing. Would these explosive scandals provide the finishing blow to Sunak’s nascent rule? Still fresh in everyone’s minds were the scandals that rocked Major’s government, still more Johnson’s. Hence Sunak’s and LBS’s [Liam Booth-Smith’s] ardent wish to bid goodbye to all that. ‘Ending the madness’ was the order of the day.

I enjoyed Seldon’s co-written demolition of Boris Johnson’s premiership, and also his similar hatchet job on Liz Truss (with reservations), so thought that I would give this a try too. Rishi Sunak was dragged rather unwillingly into the role of Prime Minister, not actually confirming to family and supporters that he wanted the job until the morning of 22 October 2022, two days after Truss had resigned and two days before he was elected leader of the Conservatives.

In fairness, he took the job very seriously once he got it, but Seldon and Egerton keep coming back to the rushed startup as a key problem for the Sunak administration. They treat it as a combination of unavoidable circumstance and Truss’ (entirely understandable) desire to get out of the door quickly once she had been shown it. However I think this was Sunak’s first serious mistake (of many); he had the same information as the rest of us, and could see that Truss’s government spent half of its duration on life support, and should have been prepared.

There are over 600 pages in the book, which I think is more than the subject deserves. I got it really to see if Seldon’s Truss book’s weird claims that she had inspired the Windsor Framework (which she actually detests) were given any further support, but apart from an unsupported throwaway remark or two, they are not. The account of the Windsor Framework is forensic but limited; it concentrates almost entirely on the palace politics at the Downing Street and Westminster end, with some small space for the local dynamics in Northern Ireland and even less for the, er, EU, and gives little indication that the authors actually understand the substance of the problem. This is not especially fair on their own sources, Sunak’s advisors, who clearly had a very good understanding of Northern Ireland.

That said, I agree with the authors that the Windsor Framework is one of Sunak’s (few) real achievements as Prime Minister, and more importantly that it’s difficult to see any of the alternative Tory leaders having achieved it. Johnson and Truss were already committed to blowing up the relationship with the EU rather than enforce the Protocol that Johnson himself had negotiated. I cannot really see Jeremy Hunt, Michael Gove or Penny Mordaunt (the other alternative Tory leaders in 2022, had Sunak not been available or not lasted) having either the necessary brains or the necessary character for it either. (See here for a sympathetic portrait of Mordaunt by Iain Dale, not that it matters now.)

Seldon and Egerton also see Sunak’s support of Ukraine as one of his key achievements. Myself, I think that any of the alternative leaders – Hunt, Gove, Mordaunt – would have followed exactly the same policy as Sunak on Ukraine, as indeed Johnson, Truss and Starmer actually did, and Burnham is doing, and it’s very difficult to point to one thing Sunak did that they would not have done.

The other big story of the book is the migration issue. One of Sunak’s (many, entirely avoidable) mistakes was to choose “Stop the boats” as one of his five key pledges, as unpacked by Rachel Cunliffe in August 2023. It was unachievable and he must have known that it was unachievable. Admittedly Sunak had a difficult legacy – Johnson had taken a strong line rhetorically against migration but in fact had facilitated it by his actual policies, so Sunak started with a in-built credibility problem.

There was then a tension between the performatively vicious side of the party (Braverman and Jenrick, both of whom have since joined Reform) and those who actually cared about not breaking the law (less vocal but as it turned out more influential). Even Seldon and Egerton, who generally boost Sunak, admit that he failed on this one, though they don’t follow through to speculate on what could have constituted success. There seems to have been no reflection on what a results-based policy would look like (and there still hasn’t been),

Sunak’s decision to go for a July election is excused by most (but not all) of those around him as the least worst of three bad options, the other two being May and November. I tend to agree. The particular consideration I hadn’t realised was that he (or rather his key advisers) hoped to outflank Nigel Farage, who was personally not ready for an election, and whose initial response (before his sponsors thought better of it) was that he would sit this one out. It was a rational choice on Sunak’s part, though it did not really work.

There is some half-hearted analysis of the extent to which Sunak was to blame for the disastrous election result. But really it came down to the destruction of their own party’s credibility in government by Johnson and Truss, which gives rise to the book’s sub-title asking if Sunak will turn out to have been the last prime minister from the Conservative Party; the precedent of the Canadian Progressive Conservatives in the 1990s is mentioned (they were outflanked by a more right-wing party, called Reform, which they later merged with). Sunak bears some but not much blame for Johnson’s failures, and none for Truss’s. (Unless you think that he did not try hard enough to defeat her in the summer leadership election, but it’s clear that he lost because Tory members preferred a white woman to an Asian man.)

For the Conservatives to win in 2024 would have required not only the steady leadership that Sunak was able to provide, but an external shock of the kind that Donald Trump provided to the Canadian Liberals in early 2025, or an implosion of the Labour Party bigger than 1983 or 2019. Whatever the wider impact of Tory policies on biodiversity may have been, Sunak is not really to blame for the shortage of black swans.

Still, looking at the polls I was interested to note that the Conservatives started the campaign at an average of 23.5% and actually got 23.7% in the election, while Labour fell from a 45% average to 33.7%. The big gainers were of course Reform (from 9% to 14.3%) and the Lib Dems (from 10% to 12.2%). Sunak deserves credit for stemming the drain of votes from his own party. Awful as the 2024 result was, it could (and maybe should!) have been even worse.

In general I hesitate to recommend this book. It is too closely concerned with the kitchen politics of 10 Downing Street while being rather hazy on the big policy picture in the most important issues, and a bit too uncritically rooted in its own sources (interviews with Sunak’s team, and the Chief Whip’s published memoirs). But it’s a compelling insider account of the slow-motion car crash that was the Sunak government, and gets you inside the heads of the driver and his crew. You can get Sunak at 10 here.