An Ex-Brit's Take on PM Sunak

Andrew Sullivan is a Britisher-turned-American and thus perfectly positioned to write this piece when Rishi Sunak became the British PM (You’ll see what I mean as you read ahead).

 

Sullivan starts off by taking a stab at Joe Biden for getting Sunak’s name wrong (Biden called him Rashid Sunak):

“He got the name wrong, but he’s Joe Biden. He gets names wrong.”

But, says Sullivan tongue-in-cheek, at least Biden is old enough to understand that Sunak as PM is a historic event. In what way?

“(Britain) was defined by empire… and nothing defined that empire more than India… And it is simply a remarkable fact that a grandson of that distant colonized country now runs the former colonial power.”

To drive the point home, he adds:

“Imagine what Gandhi might have thought of that. Or Churchill for that matter.”

 

I thought Sunak was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. Not so, says Sullivan:

“Sunak’s family was middle class — his father was a doctor and his mother a pharmacist — and he duly made his way through the British and American meritocratic system — private school (his parents saved to send him), Oxford, Stanford Business School, Goldman Sachs. He became hugely wealthy in part through his own finance career, but also because he married Akshata…”

And it is on that front that most “attacks” have come within Britain:

“The strongest attacks on Sunak have been class-based rather than racial. His wealth may be suspect among class-driven Brits, but he’s rich in a way most Americans used to admire and most still do: he came from a modest background, earned it and married it.”

Nor is his religion or heritage a problem for most Brits:

“Sunak is, for example, an openly practicing and proud Hindu. He lit Diwali lights around 11 Downing Street and took his oath on the Bhagavad Gita. That’s not someone running from his heritage.”

 

Sullivan then expresses pride in his old country:

“It is hard to imagine a non-white president of France or Germany or Italy — let alone China or Russia or anywhere in Central Europe. It is hard to think of another empire that was deliberately unwound by its architects, and who then, within two generations, installed the grandson of former colonial subjects to its most powerful office.”

And no, Sunak isn’t an isolated instance:

“Three of the top four ministers of state in Sunak’s cabinet are non-white.”

 

Sullivan then points to the “staggering silence” of the American left. You’d expect them to applaud the rise of a non-white in a fellow Anglo-Saxon country. But no, he says, the New York Times actively trashes Sunak as one from “privilege”. If you wondered why that is the case, Sullivan says it is because while Sunak checks most of the boxes that the left cares about (non-white, immigrant origin, non-Christian), he belongs to the “wrong” party (the “bigoted” Tories), a man who supported Brexit, is rich, and one who rose without any help from quota or “affirmative action” schemes…