British PM Rishi Sunak is a quick learner

The most surprising thing about Rishi Sunak being prime minister is that he doesn’t look surprised. He hasn’t been in politics long. He became an MP only seven years ago. Yet there he is, in No 10, looking as if he always expected to be there. Everyone had said he wouldn’t be so popular when he stopped handing out vast sums of borrowed money and the bills in the form of higher taxes arrived, and everyone was right. He misjudged the first of several Budget-like events, failing to help the poor with rising prices, and was then brought lower by the revelations of his wife’s non-dom status and his own US green card, which he retained until last year.

And yet, when Boris Johnson succeeded in outdoing him in the self-destruction steeplechase in July, Sunak was still the best option – in the eyes of Conservative MPs – to succeed him.

A more experienced, more cynical politician would have seized the chance of redemption and run a leadership campaign focused ruthlessly on what Conservative Party members wanted, as they would make the final choice. Instead, Sunak decided to fight a campaign based on telling party members what they didn’t want to hear. Specifically, what they did not want to hear was that more borrowing to pay for tax cuts was a “fairytale”. The more that party members suspected, deep down, that what Sunak was telling them was true, the less they liked it.

So they voted for Liz Truss, who focused ruthlessly on what they wanted and told them what they did want to hear. Even if it included calling Emmanuel Macron an enemy, saying she would ignore Nicola Sturgeon, and describing solar panels in the countryside as an eyesore.

Sunak could wait for Truss to fail, but by the time she did, the party would look for new leadership, I assumed, rather than turn to someone who had already lost a leadership election. If Truss survived long enough to lose the next general election, it seemed unlikely that the party would choose Sunak as leader of the opposition. I didn’t think that Sunak would go off to California to make more money – I didn’t think that was what was driving him; I thought he might look for a big public service job on the world stage. So I thought he was being unrealistic when his friends told me that his view was that he had to be in the Commons to have a future in politics.

But what no one could have expected was the speed with which Truss dismantled her own government. In just 49 days it was over (yes, 49, not 44; it was after 44 days that she announced she would step down; it took a further five days for her replacement to be elected unopposed).

Rarely in politics has defeat turned to victory so suddenly. Sunak lost in September and was prime minister in October. The reversal of the result of the leadership election was like a VAR decision that took seven weeks. As Robert Hutton wrote: “Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some are chased down the road by a greatness that is determined to thrust itself upon them.”

After a software glitch in his first media appearance, a robotic monologue to a camera in Tory HQ, Sunak recovered his composure. Within minutes, he had regained the assurance of someone who had won the leadership election (if you ignored the last bit).

By the time he took over, we had learned several new things about him. He is a quick learner. By the end of the leadership election hustings, he had developed a manic Blairite fluency as he warned party members that Trussonomics would end in tears, and he managed to secure a better result than any of the opinion polls predicted. And the third is that he is resilient.

In the 60 days he has been prime minister, those lessons have been reinforced. He has learnt something about cynical politics. His cabinet was a ruthless attempt to buy off as many factions as he could, from Andrew Mitchell on the left to Suella Braverman on the right. He is still learning how to do voter-facing politics. He said he wasn’t going to the climate summit in Egypt before he said he was. Having adopted a slightly over-emphatic position in refusing to consider extra money for nurses, he seemed open in a TV clip yesterday to a one-off payment: “We’d be happy to talk about all those things, and the health secretary has been clear his door, the government’s door, is always open to have those talks.”

He is also physically resilient, flying to Bali and back on the day of Jeremy Hunt’s autumn statement, the last of the many Budget-like events this year. We have learned new things about him. Each prime minister has a distinctive style of government. Small details such as the notebook he seems to use to make it look as if he is listening intently and intending to act on what people say to him, which has featured in recent pictures taken by the Downing Street photographer. And big things, such as his attention to detail.

We knew this during the coronavirus crisis, when he was the only minister who challenged Chris Whitty and Patrick Vallance on their figures (“But that’s not what it says in the appendix to your report”), but we have seen more of it now. When Sunak announced the government’s plan for asylum policy on Monday, he was on top of the detail in a way that Boris Johnson never was and that Truss had no time to be.