'Bad hand played poorly' How Sunak let No 10 and Brexit legacy slip from his grasp with wayward strategy and own goals

Rishi Sunak became Britain's prime minister quickly and unexpectedly in October 2022 after the short, financially catastrophic premiership of Liz Truss and the leadership of Boris Johnson, whose loose moral compass had allowed Downing Street to party while the rest of the UK was locked down.

- Dan Sabbagh

The economic situation was dire-inflation at 11%, mortgages threatening to soar by £5,000 a year and the political inheritance more desperate. But since then the 44-year-old prime minister has failed to turn around the Conservative's fortunes. Lacking a transformative touch, he led the party to a historic defeat.

"Undoubtedly, Rishi had a difficult hand," said Lee Cain, a former No 10 director of communications under Johnson who also advised Sunak and now runs his own firm, Charlesbye Strategy.

"But he played it poorly. He had broadly the wrong strategy from the start, in an environment where people were crying out for change. But Rishi came in and positioned himself as the status quo candidate." Team Sunak's original plan was to under-promise and over-deliver.

On the day he started, his Conservatives were 30 points behind the Labour opposition in the polls. In his first address to the nation as prime minister, Sunak promised "integrity, professionalism and accountability" and said: "Trust is earned. And I will earn yours." There are arguably two Sunaks.

The first is an immigrant success story: a British Asian from Southampton, Hampshire, a practising Hindu, the son of a GP and pharmacist, who made the historic achievement of becoming the UK's first non-white prime minister. At the age of 42, he was the youngest leader of the country in more than 200 years.

The other is a full member of Britain's old-fashioned establishment, who studied at the fee-paying Winchester college, then Oxford, before a career in the City of London and California's Silicon Valley and a plum seat in parliament. This is the man married to a wealthy heiress, Akshata Murty, whose shareholding in the Indian IT business her father cofounded is worth nearly £600m.