The final moral lesson of Rishi Sunak

©House of Commons

On Wednesday, for the first time in my life, and probably the last, Rishi Sunak made me laugh. 

"If I may offer some words of advice to members opposite," he told the Commons during the King's Speech debate. "On the government benches, life comes at you fast. Soon you might be fortunate enough to be tapped on the shoulder and offered a junior ministerial role. Then you'll find yourself attending Cabinet. Then, in the Cabinet. And then, when the prime minister's position becomes untenable, you might end up being called to the highest office. And before you know it, you have a bright future behind you and you are left wondering whether you can credibly be an elder statesman at the age of 44."

Everyone laughed. Ed Davey laughed. Ed Miliband laughed. Victoria Atkins laughed. Who was this person, they all wondered? Who was this gentle, self-deprecating, humorous speaker, who would have been so much more successful in politics had he always behaved this way?

If ever a man suited the role of leader of the opposition, it's Sunak. Certainly he seems much more comfortable in it than he ever did as prime minister. Literally overnight, he has undergone a startling metamorphosis, from a mean-spirited small-minded self-interested bully into a measured, good-humoured and respectable leader. Keir Starmer's conversation with him ahead of the speech seemed genuinely warm. Afterwards, as they stood chatting on the Commons floor, the Chamber filling up behind them, Angela Rayner and Oliver Dowden joined the pair and started sharing jokes. They all laughed together. Rayner looked delighted. Starmer clapped Dowden on the back.

"I want to thank the right honourable gentleman," Starmer said during their ensuing debate. "In every exchange that we've had since the election, and in his words today, he has gone well beyond the usual standards of generosity." 

Afterwards, Starmer had to lay into him. He had no choice. But it was actually rather sad to watch after what had preceded it. Sunak shrunk into himself a little, the goodwill of the previous exchange sinking away, a visible fear in him about how he will go down in the history books. 

Why did Starmer do it? Well that's obvious. The government's strategy is to pin the blame for the current state of the country on the previous administration. It's the George Osborne there's-no-money-left strategy. But it is distinguished from that previous iteration by virtue of the fact that it is true. Osborne was disingenuous to claim Labour didn't fix the roof when the sun was shining. The problem during the financial crash was not over-spending by the state but under-regulating of the financial sector - a failure the Tories had actively supported. 

Starmer's situation is different. The claim is real. Sunak stopped processing refugee claims, leading to ballooning accommodation costs for asylum seekers. He was warned that the criminal justice system in England and Wales was reaching the point of "critical failure", where the police and judiciary would no longer be able to exercise their legal duties. His wilful political neglect broke Britain.

What Sunak did in power was unforgivable. It is important not to forgive it. It is important to keep it clearly in mind so that we prevent it from happening again. We need to bake it into a commonly-held national narrative about competence in government, so that political leaders in future experience the incentives created by those assumptions. Labour's party-political benefit from pinning the blame on Sunak is therefore in line with both objective reality and the benefit of the country. It's the right thing to do, on every level.

Starmer was therefore right to pay his respect to Sunak and right to damn him. 

For many people online, these two realities cannot coincide. Sunak the disastrous prime minister precludes the possibility of Sunak the gracious loser. Sunak the decent opposition leader undermines the memory of Sunak the incompetent prime minister. 

There's a subcategory of this thinking, which you find predominantly on the online left. It's the One Good Tory attack. If you're lucky enough not to know what this means, I envy you. 

In short, anytime you say something positive about a Conservative, you are roundly mocked by left-wingers for being on a constant search for the One Good Tory. Let's say you think James Cleverly or Tom Tugendhat are better than Kemi Badenoch. The One Good Tory attack is activated. In my case, this is inevitably followed by bringing up an old tweet during the pandemic when I praised Sunak for his presentation during a press conference about furlough. Anytime I criticised Sunak as prime minister, which was a lot, this was brought up as a kind of gotcha.

Needless to say, this is all tremendously stupid. But delving into precisely why it is stupid is quite revealing.

The first thing which needs saying is that forgiveness and acknowledgement are different things. To acknowledge that Sunak's current behaviour does him credit is not the same as forgiving him for what came before. Someone doing one thing wrong does not eradicate their ability to later do something right, anymore than someone doing something right eradicates their ability to later do something wrong. Believing that it does annihilates the potential for human improvement and denies the possibility of human frailty. 

Perhaps we will want to conclude that Sunak is behaving this way in a desperate attempt to secure elder statesman status following his failed time in power. Honestly, there's probably something to that - he even jokingly refers to it in the quote I started this article with. But that thought can coexist with the notion that he also believes it right to behave this way, that it is important to a functioning democracy that he does behave this way, and that many of his predecessors, including Boris Johnson and Liz Truss, were temperamentally incapable of behaving this way.

The second thing to note is that it is possible to hold two thoughts in your head at the same time. 

You can simultaneously believe that Sunak was a morally reprehensible prime minister while also believing that he is an honourable leader of the opposition. And both of these things can be true at the same time, because of the endless complexity of the human personality. 

It is true, for instance, that Churchill was partially responsible for the Bengal famine, at the cost of up to 3.8 million lives. This can never be forgiven. It is also true that without him it is highly likely that Britain would have fallen to Nazism during the war, particularly in the crucial May 1940 period when Lord Halifax attempted to sue for peace. This can never be forgotten. It is true that Roman Polanski is a fine film director and also an absolute piece of shit. It is true that Margaret Thatcher was a cold-hearted ideological zealot who was right about the Falklands, or that Martin Luther King was a pivotal civil rights campaigner who cheated on his wife. And it's true that you could write this formulation about any human being alive, a balance of their roles as saint and sinner. Churchill merely operates at a particularly elevated causal level, where his decisions had global repercussions. But we're all the same. We're all a terrible muddle.

To reject this idea is not just to fail intellectually. It is to fail politically. The moment you deny the fallibility of an individual, or their potential decency, you are in the Old Testament business. You're in the world of goodies and baddies. You've mistaken politics for a GI Joe cartoon. 

This is what we recently saw towards Jeremy Corbyn years on parts on the left and Boris Johnson parts of the right: sainthood, the eradication of critical thought, and that final deadly twitch of the brain - the decision, taken multiple times a day, to form a judgement not on an assessment of evidence but on what fits your group identity. Antisemitism in the Labour party cannot be real, because that would damage Jeremy. Partygate cannot be true, because that would damage Boris. The mind's epistemological capacity breaks down completely, shattered into pieces. And all that is moral or of ethical value within the human heart collapses alongside it.

Sometime soon, I will write something critical about Keir Starmer. I'd love to think that I won't have to, because his time in office is so well judged that there is literally nothing to complain about, but somehow I doubt that. He'll do something I disagree with, or pursue a policy I object to and I'll write something disparaging. And then - I can pretty much guarantee this bit - people online will screenshot it next to a previous tweet in praise of him as an example of my lack of judgement, just as they used to screenshot my 2020 tweet praising Sunak next to whatever I'd written criticising him.

Anyone who refuses to engage in hero worship will experience something like this. What their detractors will never understand is that it demonstrates not a failure of judgement, but the presence of it. 

We are all potential hero worshippers. We are all vulnerable to degenerating into a world of goodies and baddies, where we do not have to endure the difficulties of the grey. We all want to believe in someone so much that we no longer have to think for ourselves, to lose ourselves in the mass, to give up on the daily struggle and allow ourselves to drift into the whole. The task is to reject it. To be proud of our mental independence. To commit to the mantra: No Heroes. 

If you want to see what the alternative looks like, just glance over the faces of the attendants at the Republican National Convention, where Donald Trump's disciples have begun to mirror their messiah by placing white bandages over their ears. He said once that he could "stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody" without losing any voters. That is probably true. Certainly none of the court cases against him, whether they're about insurrection or mishandling classified documents or paying hush money, have made a dent in his support. 

That is what happens when people forsake their independent judgement. That's what happens when you submit to hero worship. 

It is the disintegration of the human soul. But its political implications are perhaps even more alarming. They lead to the denial of election results, the rejection of democratic processes and the demonisation of opponents. They lead to the images we see emerging from the US now, almost daily: hate, division, violence, frenzied tribal emotions and the discernable fracture and collapse of a free society. 

That's why those images in the Commons this week were so important: Sunak recognising an election result. Starmer showing respect to his opponent. A group of political adversaries laughing together. 

It's not just a pleasant sight. It's more than that. It is a demonstration of the civility that maintains civilisation, the decency that maintains democracy. It is everything. And now, more than ever, we can look around the world and realise just how true that is.