Rishi Sunak (or Rashid Sanook, as comedy gold Joe Biden called him) is young, rich, very rich, well-groomed as men of his class are, and an unapologetic child of the Empire. His grandparents migrated to Africa from Punjab and his parents moved to Britain. In Africa, the Indians were skilled workers and clerks and supervised African labour. They played the part of colonial intermediaries that Macaulay had set out for them, this time in an alien continent.
The Africans largely detested these settler-colonial Indians. Most of them, as Orientalists of colour, followed their colonial masters back to Britain, preferring to face the racism of the white Britons to staying in independent Africa or returning to India. The African Indian contingent, like the Hong Kong Chinese brigade, is ferociously loyal to Britain and believes in the idea of its civilised empire .
Young Sunak, born in Britain, had privileged private education, worked for the financial sector, including at Goldman Sachs, as successful higher-caste Indian yuppies do since it does not involve manual labout and married the daughter of an Indian billionaire. Most of the Sunak family wealth comes from his wife's side, but now she gets to live in Downing Street, a privilege money can buy if cleverly invested.
As a loyal child of the empire, Sunak's political home is the Conservative Party where they believe in Thatcher's motto of greed is good. He is the richest member of Parliament, twice as rich as King Charles, and there are whispers that he has put away money in offshore bank accounts. His wife was found to be avoiding taxes in Britain and he was fined for violating Covid norms. In short, there can be no questions of his impeccable credentials for the party of law and order.
Sunak is an accidental Prime Minister. He has been in parliament for only seven years. As Chancellor during the Covid lockdown, his handling of the economy was somewhere between poor and disastrous. He was lucky that Boris Johnson and Liz Truss both stumbled in their jobs. The opposition Labour Party has purged its Socialist wing and recast itself as an establishment B team. Brexit has radicalised the Conservative rank and file, so Sunak had to be appointed rather than elected by party members, who had have voted Boris in again.
Sunak's opponents withdrew from the race without saying why or who had persuaded them to and the men in the shadows annointed Sunak as their man. The British version of the deep state saw in him a safe pair of hands, their best bet in a mediocre field. Sunak is not the first ethnic Indian head of government in Europe: Ireland and Portugal have had them before. His position as a British Prime Minister of colour is nevertheless a novelty. Macaulay might have been a visionary, but it is difficult to believe that even he would have predicted that the British ruling class would one day need a “learned native” to keep the white population in check. Worse, Enoch Powell's threat of rivers of blood has been reduced to a foaming torrent of tasteless curry.
