It has been an extraordinary week in British politics. It was remarked that a week is a long time in politics. Such are the unexpected and unpredictable twists and turns in human affairs. But this one has been a short week, and a thrilling one for that matter. It began with the dismissal of the ineffectual but quite personable Liz Truss, the daughter of a Leeds professor of Mathematics.
By the time the rubble cleared, history has been made on all sides. Elizabeth Truss has become the shortest serving prime minister in British history. And Rishi Sunak, grandson of Punjabi immigrants from East Africa, the son of a doctor and a pharmacist, has become the first person of colour to rule the rump of the empire on which the sun never set and the youngest since 1812. The immovable has finally collided with the unavoidable. Britain will never be the same again.
There is something about Mr Sunak’s quick, bouncy steps and elfin features which reminds one of a shaman of the orient. When he resigned from office a few weeks back as mounting scandals and indiscretions threatened to torpedo Boris Johnson, Sunak had vowed never to touch high office in the land again if it violated his principles. Despite the hint of boyish self-righteousness, there is something to be said for principled politics particularly in the wake of Boris Johnson’s freewheeling political amorality.
This past week, the former Chancellor of the Exchequer reaped the handsome dividends of the politics of principles. Unlike what happened in the earlier leadership contest when he was piped at the last post by the surging popularity of Liz Truss among the wider body of Conservative members despite being the clear front runner among conservative members of parliament, this time around, Sunak was determined not to leave anything to chance. He had maintained a tight-lipped equanimity throughout the contest which did not go down well with some party members.
In the event, it turned out to be a glorious coronation rather than the grueling contestation that everybody thought was in the offing. But it was not without its anxious moments. The lumbering figure of the inevitable rogue chancer and Rishi Sunak’s old bête noire, Boris Johnson, suddenly materialized out of the shadows, having cut short a vacation to the Dominican Republic.
It must be said that because he represents the sum total of the strengths and weaknesses of the British political populace, the former prime minister remains hugely popular and widely lionized by a large section of conservative voters. Ever the chancer with his eagle eyes focused on the main opportunity, Johnson in a strange rendezvous had offered Sunak an opportunity to cooperate and move the nation forward, a proposal which the latter summarily dismissed having seen through the lethal ruse.
But when he realized that his figures didn’t add up despite the bluff and bluster, Johnson flunked out of the race on Sunday evening, citing the reason that it was simply not the right thing to do in the interest of party unity. As usual, it was a combination of lying and dissembling. If that were to be the case, why did he cut short his vacation?
With Johnson out of the race, it remained the expansive, self-assuring figure of Penny Mordaunt, the leader of the house, to deal with. She had been hoping that in the cloak and dagger world of conservative politics, she would manage to reach the magical benchmark of a hundred conservative parliamentarians thus throwing the race open to the wider conservative public who would have been pleased to poleaxe Rishi Sunak for her just as they did for Liz Truss.
But the phalanx of conservative parliamentarians proved an impregnable fortress, forcing her to throw in the towel a few minutes to the deadline. Whatever anybody might say about the shortcomings of British politics, the system has worked seamlessly and perfectly, clearing the road for the coronation for the first British leader from the land of the ancient moguls and the biggest jewel in the crown.
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Benjamin Disraeli, novelist, wit and rake, the first British prime minister of uncontestable Jewish extraction and the person who persuaded Queen Victoria to take the title of the Empress of India, would be chuckling in his grave with characteristic chutzpah. It was a moment of great historic irony.
What goes round also comes around and the road that leads to Delhi also leads back to 11 and 10 Downing Street. If Mr Sunak manages to rescue Britain from its economic quagmire, the paradox of the periphery rescuing the metropolitan centre will not be lost on keen watchers of global developments.
Perhaps the relationship between colonizer and former colonies should not be posed in such a hostile and adversarial manner. In this collision of cultural shrines, there is always a play of signifiers across rigid, binary divisions. It must be said that of all the colonizing European powers, Britain, on the aggregate, has been the most welcoming and accommodating of immigrants from its former colonies.
This is perhaps due to some deeply held notions of the sanctity and sacrosanct nature of human liberty and freedom developed over centuries of struggle against tyranny and autocracy. Even Karl Marx, fleeing from persecution in his native Germany, was finally able to write his seminal treatise in Britain after observing the seething and throbbing contradictions of a mature industrialized society.
The result is the storied diffusion of the apex leadership of Britain with talents from other lands that we are all witnessing. All that is solid melts into thin air indeed and Britain is the better for it. The resistance to change in Britain persists at the level of the Brahmin caste of its politics and ironically in some sections of the hoi polloi. If it continues or mutates into extreme rightwing fascism, then in all likelihood Britain would feel like a Third World economy in a matter of decades.
If what is unfolding in Britain were to be a film, what an epic blockbuster we would have had on our hand! The cast would have been varied and intensely multiracial and multicultural, bristling with the dead and the living. Please step forward, Robert Clive, later ennobled as the first Baron Clive of Plasey, who is credited with adding India to the British Empire in a victory dismissed by Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru as steeped in “forgery and treason”.
Step forward Vikram Seth, the author of the fictional blockbuster, A Suitable Boy, a great novel of strategic nuptial gaming with its Sunakian echoes; the entire cast of the epic film, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers; VS Naipaul who was tormented and traumatised by his people’s docile and supine attitude to their colonial masters which allowed them to be transported as indentured slave-workers from India across half of the globe to the Caribbean coast of Trinidad and Tobago. Those who are nothing will always be nothing, the great novelist and Nobel laureate noted of his own people in equivalent words.
Finally, step forward, Edward Said, the great American literary critic and public intellectual of Palestinian extraction. In his theory of orientalism for which he became justly famous, Said advanced the thesis that the British conquerors had to reinvent the Indian orient according to their own colonial imaginary in order to be able to handle and deal with the people of the Indian sub-continent.
Yet the great historical irony is that when the affluent and plush people of the Indian subcontinent first encountered the doughty and hardy Europeans in number towards the end of the fifteenth century, they thought they were of a greatly inferior culture, scoffing and scorning at their rough and ready fabrics which they compared to their own finery and silky plumes. But they lacked the firepower and military wherewithal to sustain their assumptions of superiority.
Over the next two centuries, their declining empires were overwhelmed and gradually subdued until there was only one Raj in India. When they rebelled against their tormentors in 1857, they found that they lacked the modernist ideology to sustain and valorize their rebellion beyond a feeble recourse to what Karl Marx dismissed as the “superstitious idiocies” of rural folks. Despite their overwhelming superiority in number, they were wiped out to the last man in a scene of biblical bloodletting.
After that, all became eerily quiet on the eastern front. Perhaps until this past week when the clock of history turned full cycle and a British descendant of the old Indian empire —a practicing Hindu to boot—acceded to the most important seat of power in the land. Thus the whirligig of time has brought a sweet denouement.
But it is not a done deal, at least not yet. Rishi Sunak’s path is strewn with banana peels, as they say in this clime. He faces a Conservative party close to implosion. Judging from the events of the past week, the old Thatcherite right-wing ensemble has had its sell-by date and is on the verge of historical superannuation. The British public is restive and if the economic woes persist, it will begin braying for blood very shortly.
The new prime minister will need all the wiles, the guile and the political cujones he can summon. While holding his enemies on the extreme right and extreme left of the party at bay, constantly foiling the attempts of their principal mischief-makers to go rogue on him in a mortal struggle to own the soul of the party, he is required to clobber together a new right of the centre consensus and coalition that will see the disparate multitude he has on his hands to a new phase of modern British politics.
Rishi Sunak has all the natural smartness, the engaged braininess and the strategic intelligence to see him through the coming turbulence. But judging from his open face flowing with the milk of human innocence and the sheer naivety arising from preternatural preferment, it is not clear yet if he has the capacity to plumb the great irrational dynamics of modern British politics. The next few months will bear that out.