If Rishi Sunak could spare four hours to watch 84-year-old Sir Ian McKellen play Falstaff in London’s West End, he would have a powerful reminder not only of the longevity of some careers, but of how uneasily others carry the crown. .
By most accounts, Sunak is grappling with the prospect of his short tenure as the Conservative crown coming to a chilling end this autumn.
This led to another tale of bad moods at Downing Street, reflected in interviews in which Sunak sometimes expressed anger at the interviewer’s stupidity, including his petulant and petulant outbursts.
He would not be the first to suffer from impatience with duty.
It was Roy Jenkins who once astutely observed that the first characteristic of a successful prime minister is not a first-class intelligence but a first-class temperament. Many prime ministers have exhausted themselves complaining that the public cannot see that the government has clearly achieved what it set out to do. It is debilitating but not unusual for Sunak to want others to view his leadership in the way he believes he deserves.
One of the biggest exceptions is “Sunny Jim” James Callaghan, who in the 1979 election campaign – fighting in the shadow of the winter of discontent – hoped the polls might turn around but ruefully admitted to his policy adviser Bernard Donoughue that “there may have been one of those great shifts in public opinion. If people really “If they decide they want a change in government, there is nothing you can do.”
But such composure is rare, partly because the job alienates the Prime Minister from voters. The great Thatcherite Lord Tebbit recalls the door closing behind him when his hero first entered No. 10, and “the windows, which appear so large from the outside, immediately begin to shrink, making those inside seem less of the outside world.” the proverbial red boxes are growing around the prime minister.”
When interviewed during Covid, Tony Blair admitted that losing self-awareness was one of the biggest risks of high office. For example, he said the Covid pandemic meant it was the first time he had been in the same place in 30 years: “The truth is, the last time I drove was the day before the 1997 election. “I’ve always thought that being in power was a conspiracy to make you as abnormal as possible because of the life you’ve lived.”
Two temperamental traits that Blair possessed as prime minister were his ability to appear normal to the outside world and his ability to compartmentalize problems internally. “He rarely took a crisis with him to the next meeting,” says one of his aides.
And although he wants the best possible media coverage for his government, he has not let the issue consume him after three election victories.
In response, John Major admitted that, despite all his instincts and plans, the press had become overly sensitive about what he wrote. He told the Leveson inquiry: “God knows why I was the way I was, but I was. It’s a basic human emotion to get a little grumpy about this. “My overreaction was basically a human overreaction.” First of all, he could not recognize himself in what he read.
Prime Ministers also often find that they are less powerful than they imagined when they took office, and that pulling levers and pushing buttons does nothing. Sir Douglas Jay, for example, likened Clement Attlee to “a cornered animal or a climber unable to go up or down the rock face” rather than “a general commanding his troops across the field”.
What is worse is that a single defining event has transformed and solidified the public mood, leaving the resident of number 10 even more frustrated and frustrated as he lurches from one strategy to another to reactivate a public that has apparently closed its mind to re-evaluation.
During his second term, Major never recovered from being kicked out of the exchange rate mechanism in September 1992, and in hindsight he should have acted on the resignation letter he had prepared. He would disagree with Tebbit’s account of the irreversible damage of the ERM affair: “Nearly 30 years before Black Wednesday, Gallup’s monthly tracking polls asked respondents which party they viewed as more competent to manage the economy. Only once in all those years has there been a Labor response. “Only once in the 12 years since Black Wednesday have the Conservatives responded.”
But this left Major, like Sunak, increasingly angry at the “bastards” in his cabinet who he felt were dragging him down. One of his aides recalls: “You think there are tricks to pull off, or that someone in the party will behave properly, but then, when you think deeply, you realize it’s all pointless. But this is true in retrospect. “It was human instinct at the time to think it was salvageable or to blame someone else.”
No one was better than Lady Thatcher at blaming someone else, least of all for her death. Diarist and MP Alan Clark recalls seeing him as the equivalent of Elba in the immediate aftermath of his sacking. “His sense of betrayal is absolute; It invalidates everything. [Norman] Lamont was making plans. [Chris] Patten planned everything. Kenneth Clarke had led the rout in the cabinet room. [Malcolm] Rifkind was a weasel. Even John Major is certainly not cloudless.
“I remembered something Tebbit had said to him privately: ‘Prime Minister, you are the one who chooses the cabinet.’”
Theresa May had her own problems with her cabinet, particularly the undisciplined Boris Johnson and a harsh Brexit-supporting press, but Downing Street dealt with these problems calmly, at least in the last two years when Gavin Barwell was chief of staff. He also had the wisdom to realize that his time was up.
The only real argument he had with Barwell was when he blamed him for losing his temper in his resignation speech.
However, if there is a prime minister most similar to Sunak in recent times, it is Gordon Brown. They are both well-behaved, highly intelligent, unpolitical, and work all the hours God provides, plus overtime.
Of course, Brown was visibly struggling with the demands of the mission. His friends say he is harder on himself than anyone else and suffers from congenital disorganization. Lockers in hotels were moved to cover marks on the walls caused by office equipment projectiles thrown by the frustrated prime minister.
Sunak’s anger towards the world seems mild; a low, feeble whine in the face of a brooding volcano. But Brown nearly fought his way into government, hiding in Downing Street for five days after the election, searching for a coalition. According to Sunak, there has been a major change of heart and there is nothing he or any Tory can do to reverse it.