The Forum

Rishi Sunak has come farther than any man of his background has come before in the scrum for power in British Tory politics. Sunak—the UK’s former chancellor of the exchequer—is one of two candidates from the British Conservative Party now vying  for the post of prime minister. According to party rules, he will face off against his rival—Boris Johnson’s former Home Secretary Liz Truss—in a series of twelve debates around the country that roughly a quarter million Tory voters will evaluate as they deliver a verdict on the nominee by mail. (Truss polled strongly after the first such debate last week, and, thanks to her ties to the Tory Party establishment, she remains the favorite to win.)

That initial face-off didn’t lack for reality-TV-style drama, as the moderator fainted on air and the proceedings were cut short. Nevertheless, Truss had cannily sounded the note of right-wing feminist outrage in an electoral contest that feels like something of a through-the-looking-glass version of traditional left-leaning appeals to historic exclusions and injustices. Truss charged Sunak with “aggression” and “mansplaining” in an early effort to depict him as an intemperate brown man given to threaten the status and well-being of white British womanhood. While Truss’s rhetoric may be overblown, there’s more than enough evidence to shore it up:  One video supercut of the televised debate shows Sunak interrupting Truss a whopping 20 times in 12 minutes.

Sunak saw the damage that such charges were doing, and quickly sought to engineer a course correction. The second debate showcased a kinder and more deferential Sunak, but these feints at impression management sidestep the central question of this campaign: Can a brown man ever become the prime minister of Britain ? Or to put things a bit more plainly in the prevailing terms of Tory party Realpolitik: How much wealth and privilege must be mobilized in order to make a brown man white enough to lead the Conservative Party in Parliament? (Sunak, who married into the Infosys fortune that his wife Akshata Murphy inherited, has a reported net worth of $1.2 billion.)

Raw demographics show the scope of the challenge before Sunak. England’s population is  more than 80 percent white, and the national myth of the nineteenth-century empire casts the white leaders of the British homeland as the rightful spiritual and political overlords of millions of Black and brown people. So it’s no great surprise that early polls show Sunak trailing Truss by more than 20 points—or that he’s fended off a series of scurrilous racist attacks on his candidacy.

Sunak, not unlike Barack Obama, grew from a mélange of roots. He was raised by Indian-Punjabi parents who had themselves grown up among the Indian community in East Africa. Sunak’s parents, both medical professionals, migrated to England and shipped him off to a series of fancy private prep and boarding schools. Oxford followed—and  then Stanford, where he met his wife and returned to Britain to launch his career in Britain’s Conservative Party. His current seat in Parliament is supposed to be the safest Conservative seat in the UK. Optimists might suggest that his elevation to this post demonstrates his importance to Conservative establishment; pessimists might note that a brown man in Britain could only be assured electoral victory in a gerrymandered borough. Like Prime Minister Boris Johnson, Sunak also served on the Tory Cabinet Committee and broke Covid rules by attending parties. But unlike Johnson, he didn’t resign when he was found out.

The racial landscape of the United Kingdom is markedly different from that of the United States. Most minorities in Britain are South Asians who began to migrate to the United Kingdom to fill low-skilled jobs in the 1970s. Decades later, these populations still tend to be concentrated and ghettoized into low-income areas. The divisions between South Asians from India and Pakistan persist in the country that fomented these ethno-political rivalries to solidify British colonial rule in South Asia. And such tensions have accelerated as Britain took a leading role in the global war on terror, with British Muslim communities facing surveillance and racial profiling absent in Hindu communities.

The pronounced strain of Islamophobia among British-Indians has made them a solid constituency for the Conservative party, which has long rationalized discrimination against British Muslims by profiling the whole population as terrorist sympathizers. The recent spike in Islamophobia in India itself—where the government of Prime Minister Narenda Modi has legitimized and even promoted violence against Muslims—may have propelled British-Indians away from the Labour party’s critiques of Islamophobia and further into the arms of the Tories.

Sunak’s candidacy seeks to shunt these broader racial dynamics aside in favor of an opportunistic right-wing embrace of the callow rhetoric of racelessness. In this scheme of things, Sunak symbolizes the earnest striving brown man of ambition raising himself up by his own bootstraps. (Never mind his fortuitous marriage.) Sunak is selling himself as the model leader of a studiously non-parochial global capitalism, in which money trumps everything—even race. The aspirational mantra of Tory strategists is that there is no Black or white or Brown—there is only rich and poor. In the words of one Londoner, Sunak’s candidacy enables British-Indians to nurse the fantasy that they, too, are members of the white upper class.

For its part, the Labour Party is not exactly a bastion of minority inclusion. Not unlike today’s global-minded Tory ruling caste, Labour operatives have hailed minority leaders in select offices, but have largely sidestepped the sort of systemic changes that would root out racism against the formerly colonized populations now making their home in Britain. Labour support for affirmative action-type programs that would equalize opportunities has been lackluster at best—and Labour leaders tend to be invested in many of the ruling myths that thrust British colonial rule on the ancestors of brown and Black Britons. Indeed, a third of English citizens insist that the British Empire was a largely benevolent enterprise thought up by white people to assist lesser Brown and Black others. Seventy-six years after they left India, the British still don’t like to be told that they looted and plundered the place. As the podcaster and author Afua Hirsch put it, “We are engulfed in a sense of denial” when it comes to the legacies of imperial rule.

In proffering Sunak as a new model Tory leader, Conservative strategists wish to spare themselves the ordeal of acknowledging that the former conquerors and the formerly conquered cannot be automatically equal without systemic adjustments and material reparations. Sunak—the clear beneficiary of all the institutions that keep the benevolent colonialism narrative going—will never challenge any of its predicates. For her part, Truss has sweepingly denounced the “politics of languages, statues and pronouns,” while declaring her opposition to NHS identity cards for trans people.

Debating Liz Truss, a middle-aged white woman who began her political career as a Liberal Democrat, may well be the career challenge that punctures Sunak’s self-made myth. The two may be sparring about taxes, but at a deeper level, their rivalry represents a contest over the meaning of Britain’s agonized past. Brown men—vehemently politicized ones especially—were a threat to the British empire for centuries; they were routinely brought up for criminal prosecution and worse if they threatened the white wives and daughters of their colonial overlords. When India won its independence from the crown in 1948, the British were doubtful that brown people could even govern themselves—and distressingly little has altered that imperial dogma over the ensuing 76 years.

This enduring sensibility of racist and imperial self-regard is perhaps the chief—if little acknowledged—reason that Truss is the favorite to win. What’s more, many British commentators have pointed out that the official ballots for Party members will be mailed next week—meaning that a majority of them will already have voted before the debates are over. Still other commentators say that the fierce tenor of the debates so far is a problem for the Conservative Party—revealing the cracks and general disarray within its ruling coalition. With the whole country seeing the fallout from such intraparty tensions up close on nationwide television, conservatives fear that the hapless Labour Party could gain the upper hand in the general election.

Sunak’s candidacy can be considered a test of what the United Kingdom’s preferred narrative of race and individual progress will be. It is usually the more liberal party—Labour in the British context—that ends up sponsoring racial minorities for political leadership. London Mayor Sadiq Khan is, in this sense, the Labour version of Rishi Sunak. Brown people—even though they may be conservative on social issues—vote Labour because many are working class and bear the brunt of wide-ranging socio-economic discrimination.

The narrative subtitle for Sunak’s rapid rise in the Conservative Party could well be “How British-Indians became white.” The different trajectories of British-Indians versus other UK minorities are grounded in the aspirational ideas promising that hard work permits anyone to rise and shine in the UK’s political landscape. It seems likely, however, that the grievance politics of Liz Truss—overlaid with the rhetoric of upper-class feminist representation—may leave the broad imperial presumptions of British conservative rule very much intact.