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Mr. Wooldridge’s essay about Sunak is awash in political cynicism? its a convenient posture, that almost mimics critical thinking, under a heavy veneer of the ersatz.

Britain | Bagehot

Headline: No, really. Rishi Sunak is a right-winger

Sub-headline: The prime minister is the most right-wing Conservative leader of his generation 

https://www.economist.com/britain/2023/07/27/no-really-rishi-sunak-is-a-right-winger?utm_medium=social-media.content.np&utm_source=twitter&utm_campaign=editorial-social&utm_content=discovery.content

Note that Wooldridge ‘shows’ Sunak in his various guises in the first three paragraphs of this essay:

Followers of Rishi Sunak on social media are treated to high politics and low culture. In one post, the prime minister accused Labour of being on the same side as “criminal gangs” who profit from smuggling people across the Channel into Britain. In another, a beaming Mr Sunak posed with his young family mulling whether to see “Barbie”, the pinktastic film about the doll, or “Oppenheimer”, a biopic about the godfather of the atom bomb. “Barbie first it is,” posted the unapologetically lowbrow politician.

Mr Sunak’s perky and nerdy demeanour covers an overlooked fact: he is comfortably the most right-wing Conservative prime minister since Margaret Thatcher. Taking a hard position on asylum-seekers is just the beginning. On everything from social issues, devolution and the environment to Brexit and the economy, Mr Sunak is to the right of the recent Tory occupants of 10 Downing Street. Yet neither voters nor his colleagues seem to have noticed.

Critics dismiss Mr Sunak’s hardline position on small boats crossing the Channel as focus group-led posturing. Mr Sunak has made stemming the flow of people across those waters one of the main goals of his government. The prime minister has curtailed the right of asylum for people who arrive in small boats. A barge for 500 asylum-seekers is docked in Dorset waiting for its human cargo. Mr Sunak wants to solve the crisis in the most aggressive and prominent way. If it is all for show, it is a needlessly expensive blockbuster. There is a simpler explanation for Mr Sunak’s approach: he believes in it.

Wooldridge, in the next five paragraphs, writes a made to measurer potted history of the Tories. These topic sentences are indicative of the Wooldridge attempt at a methodology.

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Where recent Conservative prime ministers dragged the party towards liberalism, Mr Sunak is resolutely traditionalist.

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Each recent Conservative prime minister has boasted of their environmentalism.

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Critics within the party moan that Mr Sunak is a closet leftie: a man who was too quick to spend money when he was chancellor during the pandemic and is too slow to cut taxes now that he is prime minister.

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When it comes to Brexit, now a religious question for the Conservatives rather than a policy one, Mr Sunak was always a believer.

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Mr Sunak’s credentials as a right-winger are close to immaculate.

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The final two paragraphs are -let me highlight a selection of Wooldridge’s wan attempt, at an informed analysis of Sunak’s status as right-winger. Yet the long time reader of Wooldridge, finds the terminus of his political analysis of Sunak, awash in political hypocrisy: in sum Wooldridge is an unapologetic Right-Winger. Given that, what might be the political purpose of this multi-layered polemic?

Right On

Ultimately, Mr Sunak’s strange reputation is due to the scrambling of British politics after 2016, which mangled the old left-right axis. Mr Sunak’s most decisive act was to bring down Mr Johnson. If Mr Johnson was Brexit incarnate, then his assassin must be a Remainer stooge. Right-wing Brexiters flocked to the Remain-supporting Ms Truss, who was loyal to Mr Johnson, in the leadership contest last summer; Mr Sunak relied on a rump of more liberal Tory mps. Nor was this delusion isolated to Conservatives. After the unprofessionalism of Mr Johnson and the chaos of Ms Truss, centrists welcomed the rise of the diligent Mr Sunak, mistaking competence for liberalism. They assumed he was one of their own based on his age, manner and background rather than his views. Many of them still do.

It is this ideological dissonance that creates the danger for Mr Sunak. He is left channelling another former prime minister who had to persuade his party his views were genuine. In 2001, after New Labour had secured re-election, one party wallah asked Sir Tony if he would ditch his rightward drift. Sir Tony replied: “It’s worse than you think. I really do believe in it.” Mr Sunak is right-wing out of conviction, rather than convenience—even if few others believe it.

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