Rishi Sunak interview: the key points
With the Conservative Party languishing in the polls, Rishi Sunak could do with some divine intervention. He met Pope Francis at the G7 summit in southern Italy on Friday but joked the pair did not have time for a “long enough spiritual conversation”.
Sunak’s party is said by many to be in the midst of a death spiral, following weeks of gaffes and missteps, which culminated in him being accused of insulting war veterans by leaving the D-Day commemoration early.
Now, for the first time, he has opened up about how he has dealt with the difficulties he and his party have faced, saying he had turned to his faith to give him the strength to carry on.
Denying he was frustrated that the public had not rewarded him for his work ethic and steadying the ship after Liz Truss’s disastrous 49 days in Downing Street, Sunak explained his commitment to the Hindu “concept of dharma”.
In an interview in the margins of the meeting of world leaders at the palatial Borgo Egnazia resort in Puglia, the prime minister, 44, said: “In Hinduism, there’s a concept of duty called dharma, which is roughly translated as being about doing your duty and not having a focus on the outcomes of it. And you do it because it’s the right thing to do, and you have to detach yourself from the outcome of it.”
Ever since Tony Blair’s spin doctor Alastair Campbell declared “We don’t do God”, no prime minister — and few politicians — have discussed their faith. But Sunak, Britain’s first prime minister of Indian heritage, is different. He is a practising Hindu who has a shrine in No 10 for family worship and works with a Lord Ganesh statue on his desk. His faith guides every aspect of his life and when he took over from Truss — despite all of the challenges he expected as PM — he thought it was his “dharma” to serve the nation.
Sunak admits it’s “not an easy thing to do”, adding: “But that is something I was raised with, and that is also something that gives me the strength to deal with the things that you’re describing, because I get fulfilment from just doing what I believe is right. And as you say, work as hard as you can, do what you believe is right, and try, and what will be will be.”
Rejecting accusations that Truss, whose mini-budget sent the markets into freefall, is also to blame for the Conservative Party’s meltdown in the polls, Sunak said: “I’m ultimately responsible for what I’m doing and no one else is. It rests on my shoulders.”
He added: “Look, we have had a tough time. That’s not someone’s fault that we had a pandemic and then a war in Ukraine, and that is a big source of the frustration and insecurity that people feel and all the damage that it’s done to our living standards over the past few years.
“It’s nobody’s fault. That is just the reality of the situation. But I really think that after a lot of hard work and resilience from everybody, we’ve got through the worst of that and we’ve turned a corner. The economy is growing faster than all our major competitors. Inflation is back to normal, wages are rising, energy bills are falling, so people can, I hope, start to feel more confident about the future.”
Pizza with Trudeau on his likely last hurrah
Sunak is enjoying what is likely to be his final hurrah on the world stage. He spent Friday night at a gala dinner making pizza with Justin Trudeau, the Canadian prime minister, and watching the opening match of Euro 2024 between Scotland and Germany with Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission.
The summit, hosted by Sunak’s closest ally Giorgia Meloni, the Italian prime minister, concluded with the world-famous tenor Andrea Bocelli singing Puccini’s Nessun dorma, which literally translates to “none shall sleep”.
With the campaign entering its fourth week, exhaustion is a state Sunak is familiar with. And with the polls stubbornly refusing to budge, it would be little surprise if the threat of an extinction-level event for his party was keeping him awake at night.
‘What patriotism means to me’
With Nigel Farage on the march, Sunak ducked the question about whether the Reform leader should be welcomed into the Conservative Party, as some of his colleagues, including the former home secretary Suella Braverman, have called for.
“Nigel Farage is not in the Conservative Party today and a vote for anyone who’s not a Conservative candidate is a vote that makes it more likely that Keir Starmer will be in No 10,” he said. “So if you’re someone who thinks controlling migration is important, stopping the boats is important, cutting taxes is important, getting to net zero in a sensible, proportionate way is important, protecting pensions is important. We’re the only party that’s going to deliver that for you.
“The only poll that matters is the one on July 4. But if that poll was to be replicated on polling day, that would mean handing Keir Starmer a completely blank cheque, which would mean everyone’s taxes going up. Your home, your work, your car, your pension, you name it, taxes are going up.”
While most of the cabinet — including the prime minister — have been careful not to attack Reform for fear of alienating wavering voters, Sunak adopts a more direct approach.
Taking on Farage’s claims after his D-Day blunder that he is not a patriotic leader and “does not understand our culture”, Sunak said: “My grandparents emigrated to the UK and then two generations later I’m sitting here talking to you as prime minister. I actually don’t think my story is possible in pretty much any other country in the world and what it shows is, in our country, if you work hard, if you integrate, if you subscribe and adhere to British values, then you can achieve anything.
“So that’s what patriotism means to me: it’s having pride in our incredible country for everything that it’s done for me and my family.”
‘I’m proud of Brexit — Starmer would reverse it all’
With polling showing Reform attracting more 2016 Leave voters than the Tories, Sunak insists it is his party which had delivered “Brexit freedoms”.
“As was said in last week’s debate by [Sky News presenter] Beth Rigby, I am the original Brexiteer,” he said. “I was proud to support Brexit and it was the right decision for our country because we can take advantage of the opportunities that are now ahead of us. We’re signing free-trade deals around the world, which have now led to Brexit Britain overtaking France, the Netherlands and Japan, to become the fourth largest exporter in the world.”
He added: “We were able to cut alcohol duty or beer duty in pubs, which was something we couldn’t do inside the European Union. The industries of the future, where we’re regulating them in a flexible way, that’s about growth and innovation, whether it’s artificial intelligence, whether it’s agritech, whether it’s financial services, whether it’s digital, all of those areas. We are embracing innovation and growth and competitiveness. That’s why we’re the technology superpower of Europe and only growing in that regard. We’re cutting red tape for businesses.”
Sunak claims Starmer, who pledged to keep the UK outside the EU in his party’s manifesto, would “reverse all the progress”.
He said: “This is someone who literally wanted to have a second referendum, said he wants to defend free movement of people and is always interested in closer EU alignment, which would just mean us signing up to EU rules without any say and reverse all the progress that we’ve made over the last few years.”
Warning of the other dangers of handing Labour a super-majority, the prime minister accused Starmer of ushering in French-style strike laws after he set out his plans for the biggest shake-up in labour laws in a generation. Labour’s new deal promises to repeal anti-strike laws, end the use of “fire and hire” and strengthen Day 1 rights for employees.
“There are 70 different regulations that Angela Rayner is going to bring in to change how our labour market works,” Sunak said. “They are a recipe to bring French-style labour laws to the UK that will destroy jobs, damage our economic recovery, and make strikes more likely.”
Dividing line on defence
Sunak is also concerned Starmer will risk national security by failing to match the Conservative manifesto pledge to increase defence spending to 2.5 per cent of GDP by 2030. Speaking on the eve of the peace summit in Switzerland, which he will attend alongside President Zelensky of Ukraine, the prime minister said voters have “just 18 days left until the election to secure the future of our country”.
“Because Starmer is not willing to match the pledge … not only are we less able to keep our own citizens and country safe, we’re not able to guarantee Ukraine the support it needs for years, we’re not able to send that strong signal of deterrence to our adversaries like Russia, and we’re not able to demonstrate moral leadership amongst our allies to get them to increase their investments,” he said.
Sunak said one of the first things Starmer would be required to do would be attend the Nato summit next month, where he would be signalling to the world his intention to spend less on defence. “It’s a very stark choice,” he said. “That’s why I’m incredibly worried about the future, because the world demands that we do invest more to keep our country safe and send that strong signal to Putin.”
Sunak, who has developed a close rapport with Zelensky, said he would be “sad” not to continue his work supporting Ukraine after he helped to broker a deal at the G7 to use frozen Russian assets to raise £39 billion.
“We have a strong personal friendship, which I value, but also it’s built on tangible action at all the critical moments over the last year and a half that I’ve been prime minister,” he said. “I’ve stepped up to do the extra thing to help Ukraine before others. We were the first country to say that we were going to provide main battle tanks, the first country to provide training for pilots, the first country to provide long-range weapons. And at each one of those moments, lots of people said that was not the right thing to do. And at each one of those moments, I made a decision. I took the bold action in order to support Ukraine and ultimately support our security.”
Closer to home, Sunak is seeking to address his own existential threat: the collapse in young Tory voters. A YouGov poll published in September last year suggested that only one per cent of people aged between 18 and 24 planned to vote Conservative at the election. “We’ve got, I think, a set of big, bold offers for young people in the manifesto that a future Conservative government would usher in,” he said.
These include introducing compulsory national service for 18-year-olds, curbing “rip-off degrees” and creating 100,000 “high-quality apprenticeships”. The party has also pledged to introduce a new help- to-buy scheme and permanently scrap stamp duty on homes up to £425,000 for first-time buyers.
Sunak could soon be looking for a new home of his own if, as the polls predict, he is evicted from Downing Street on July 4. However, he has vowed to stay on as an MP for the next five years if he wins in Richmond & Northallerton, in North Yorkshire. “I love being an MP. I love my constituents,” he said.
