History rarely gives a politician a clean slate. When Rishi Sunak walked through the black door of Number 10 in October 2022, he wasn't stepping into a leadership role; he was taking over a smoking ruin.
Anthony Seldon and Tom Egerton's new inside account, Sunak at 10, paints a vivid picture of a leader who was essentially a reluctant tenant in a house already collapsing around him. But let's be honest about the broader picture. Blaming Sunak entirely for the electoral annihilation of the Conservative Party misses the point. The party had been fracturing itself for years before he ever picked up the keys.
The Inheritance of Chaos
You can't understand Sunak's premiership without looking at the dumpster fire left behind by his predecessors. He inherited an economy reeling from Liz Truss's disastrous mini-budget, soaring inflation, and a public that had completely lost faith in Westminster.
Instead of stepping back, Sunak tried to fix the plumbing while the building was on fire. He was diligent, detail-oriented, and intensely focused on policy mechanics. But politics isn't an accounting spreadsheet. Voters don't care about balanced fiscal rules when they feel poorer than they did five years prior. His style was too technocratic for a country craving an emotional connection or a radical break from the past.
The Myth of the Clean Break
One of the most revealing claims in Seldon's book involves the toxic legacy of Boris Johnson. Johnson's loyalists never forgave Sunak for resigning as chancellor in July 2022, a move that helped trigger Johnson's downfall. Seldon argues that Sunak's team worked forensically behind the scenes to undermine Johnson while maintaining a public veneer of loyalty.
Whether you view that resignation as an act of high principle or calculated ambition, it created an unhealable fracture on the right flank of the Conservative Party. Sunak tried to appease warring factions by bringing figures like Suella Braverman into the Cabinet, but it only projected weakness. He was constantly looking over his shoulder, trapped between party members who thought he was too moderate and voters who felt he represented fourteen years of exhausted governance.
Foreign Policy Wins Versus Domestic Fatigue
Sunak actually performed reasonably well where he didn't have to deal with the British electorate directly. His handling of foreign affairs, particularly securing the Windsor Framework with the European Union and maintaining strong support for Ukraine, showed real diplomatic competence.
Yet none of that mattered on the doorsteps. When voters are waiting months for a doctor's appointment and dealing with soaring mortgage rates, foreign policy victories register as background noise. Sunak's missteps—like the ill-fated early departure from D-Day commemorations—reinforced a narrative that he was out of touch, wealthy, and disconnected from ordinary life.
The End of an Era
The 2024 general election wasn't just a defeat for Sunak; it was a structural rejection of the entire Conservative brand. Seldon and Egerton's subtitle, The Last Conservative Prime Minister?, asks a provocative question, but it gets to the heart of the crisis. When a political movement spends more time fighting itself than governing the country, the public eventually changes the locks. Sunak did his best to manage the decline, but nobody could have saved a party determined to eat its own.
