Anthony Seldon has written political biographies of every British prime minister since John Major. (His books on David Cameron, Boris Johnson, and Liz Truss have also been reviewed here.) His latest, Sunak at Ten, deals with Rishi Sunak’s premiership from 2022 to 2024 and is based on interviews with Sunak and many of his former cabinet ministers.
The Tories suffered their worst ever election defeat under Sunak, though this came after fourteen years of increasingly chaotic Conservative governments, as covered by Ben Riley-Smith in The Right to Rule. If judged purely on the election result, Seldon and his co-author Tom Egerton admit that Sunak “failed miserably”, though they acknowledge that another Conservative victory was almost impossible regardless of who was PM.
Seldon and Egerton cite four criteria by which UK prime ministers should be judged — the national economy, Britain’s international reputation, the strength of the union, and public trust in politics — arguing that Sunak’s leadership improved all except the last. But again, after the disasters of Sunak’s immediate predecessors, public confidence in politics at that point was unrecoverable.
Their final assessment of Sunak is nuanced and ambivalent: “he left his country stronger and more secure than he found it, if still divided and beset by chronic problems.” In Out, which also covered Sunak’s government, Tim Shipman was more critical: “the lack of a driving political vision gave him no political cover from failures of delivery.”
Sunak at Ten’s subtitle is The Last Conservative Prime Minister? This rhetorical device — posing a question to which the answer is almost certainly ‘no’ — is more suited to tabloid newspapers than political biographies, and unsurprisingly, in their final sentence, the authors conclude that “we believe it unlikely that Sunak will have been the last Tory prime minister.”
The Tories suffered their worst ever election defeat under Sunak, though this came after fourteen years of increasingly chaotic Conservative governments, as covered by Ben Riley-Smith in The Right to Rule. If judged purely on the election result, Seldon and his co-author Tom Egerton admit that Sunak “failed miserably”, though they acknowledge that another Conservative victory was almost impossible regardless of who was PM.
Seldon and Egerton cite four criteria by which UK prime ministers should be judged — the national economy, Britain’s international reputation, the strength of the union, and public trust in politics — arguing that Sunak’s leadership improved all except the last. But again, after the disasters of Sunak’s immediate predecessors, public confidence in politics at that point was unrecoverable.
Their final assessment of Sunak is nuanced and ambivalent: “he left his country stronger and more secure than he found it, if still divided and beset by chronic problems.” In Out, which also covered Sunak’s government, Tim Shipman was more critical: “the lack of a driving political vision gave him no political cover from failures of delivery.”
Sunak at Ten’s subtitle is The Last Conservative Prime Minister? This rhetorical device — posing a question to which the answer is almost certainly ‘no’ — is more suited to tabloid newspapers than political biographies, and unsurprisingly, in their final sentence, the authors conclude that “we believe it unlikely that Sunak will have been the last Tory prime minister.”
