BRENDAN O'NEILL: Rishi Sunak has proved he DOES have fire in his belly

BRENDAN O’NEILL: I was a Rishi Sunak sceptic. But in taking on culture warriors, eco-zealots and sex offenders he has proved he DOES have political fire in his belly

Confession: I have long been a Rishi Sunak sceptic. I once even referred to him as ‘the head boy from hell’. He struck me as square, stiff, managerial – an officious hall monitor at Winchester elevated to the highest job in the land.

He positioned himself as the anti-Boris candidate, which made me uneasy, since the last time we had a general election, Mr Johnson won a thumping majority.

In a bid to distance himself from Boris’s charismatic leadership, Mr Sunak told us we needed a manager, not a firebrand. It was soul-zappingly uninspiring. He was like Gordon Brown 2.0, only younger and better-looking.

And, of course, the Borisphobes in the liberal media lapped it up. The chattering classes started to see Sunak as their saviour from the stormy seas of Brexit and Boris Johnson.

Stability

Yes, he was a Leaver, but a nice one. He’s a ‘cosmopolitan technocrat’, chirped the business magazine Bloomberg.

‘He’s Captain Sensible’, whereas Boris was always ‘blundering’, a Tory insider told The Times.

Rishi Sunak struck me as square, stiff, managerial – an officious hall monitor at Winchester elevated to the highest job in the land. Pictured: Mr Sunak at Crofton Park near Birmingham in July

He positioned himself as the anti-Boris candidate, which made me uneasy, since the last time we had a general election, Mr Johnson won a thumping majority. Pictured: Former Prime Minister Boris Johnson in June this year

Yet after months of scepticism, I’m starting to change my mind. It seems timid Sunak might, in fact, have political fire in his belly.

No, the super-wealthy former hedge-fund manager is not about to become a man of the people, knocking back pints with the good folk of Bishop Auckland or Hartlepool. But he is coming up with good, bold ideas. He does seem, at last, to be paying attention to ordinary people.

Who would have thought that Sunak would take on the culture-war crazies of the virtue-signalling Left who have done so much to run this country into the ground?

READ MORE HERE: Rishi Sunak gets a boost before Tory conference as polls show Conservatives clawing back ground on Labour following Net Zero U-turn – while PM’s personal ratings also rise

Consider Sunak’s plan to get a handle on crime, as exclusively revealed in this newspaper yesterday.

Sunak is plotting a ‘gear change’ on law and order, to prove that his government is really serious about keeping people safe.

His proposals include forcing convicted rapists to serve their full sentence. No more early release from the slammer for those convicted of the worst sexual offences.

Finally, some sense. For too long, politicians have underestimated how concerned ordinary people are about social disintegration.

And the snooty bourgeois Left looks down its nose at those of us who worry about ‘law ‘n’ order’.

In truth, working people crave stability. They want peaceful streets where their kids can play without having to worry about gangs or knives or dangerous dogs.

The irony is that, while millionaire Sunak in his £7 million home in London’s Kensington will never experience the worst of Britain’s social mayhem, he seems to understand the concerns of ordinary people better than anyone in the Labour Party.

He’s even going after the UK’s ‘most hated’ levy: inheritance tax. It is reported the Prime Minister is considering scrapping it all together. Let’s hope he will: it’s music to the ears of aspirational Britons.

And consider his one-man revolt against net zero.

Sunak has dared to say the thing that politicians are not meant to say – that the zealous rush to net zero will hurt the less well-off, and therefore we might have to put the brakes on it.

He announced last week that he’s going to postpone net zero’s more draconian targets, including the planned ban on new petrol and diesel cars and the forced replacement of boilers with heat pumps.

Brendan O’Neill (pictured) has been won over by Rishi Sunak

But it was his swipe at the dishonesty of the green-leaning Establishment that felt genuinely bold. The elites, he said, ‘have not been honest about the costs and trade-offs’ of net zero.

And he’s absolutely right. This green drive has been dressed up as a progressive, charitable initiative.

Yet anyone with sense knows that it is ordinary people and businesses who will be battered by the expense and inconvenience of such ambitious targets. To inflict such impoverishing measures during a cost-of-living crisis would be wrong and cruel.

It’s the well-off liberals in Parliament who obsess over apocalyptic climate models. Meanwhile, most ordinary people are more concerned with being able to pay their bills at the end of each month – something made all the more difficult by the headlong rush to green energy.

Sunak deserves credit for slowing net zero. We should not underestimate the courage it takes for a mainstream politician to prick the Establishment’s cosy and deluded green consensus.

I was pessimistic about the next general election. It seemed to me that our choice was between two jumped-up bank managers: grey Sunak and greyer Starmer. Yet Sunak seems to be striking out. Pictured: Sir Keir Starmer at the London Stock Exchange on September 22

Truth

Then there is his bristling at the woke ideology. For too long, Sunak and his allies thought they could sit on the sidelines of the culture war.

Yet, finally, Sunak seems to be realising that he needs to do some fighting.

He recognises that those who shout down gender-critical women or teach lessons in schools on white privilege need to be stopped.

It might seem ludicrous, but it is genuinely admirable that Sunak is one of the few politicians willing to say women do not have penises.

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It is a necessary bulwark against Westminster’s irrational gender frenzy which saw Keir Starmer claim 99.9 per cent of women don’t have a penis (which means he bizarrely believes one in 1,000 women do, and the Lib Dems’ Ed Davey, who went even further, saying women ‘quite clearly’ can have one).

So much of the political class doesn’t seem to understand how important truth and reality are to ordinary people.

After all, if we can’t trust our politicians to tell the truth about something as rudimentary as biological sex, why should we trust them on anything else?

Sunak is also considering amending the Equality Act to ban schools from ‘socially transitioning’ children to a different gender without their parents’ consent. This would be a vital defence of parental rights, and a blow to the trans ideologues who think they know what’s best for pupils.

Populism

To that end, Sunak looks set to halt the Government’s ban on conversion therapy. He fears, rightly, that such a ban could punish parents and therapists who just want to make vulnerable teenagers think before transitioning.

So given my original scepticism, I have been surprised by Sunak’s political valour in recent weeks.

He knows the costs of standing up to the liberal elite’s consensus opinion, and yet he’s done it. On crime, net zero and wokeness, he has set a new agenda.

I was pessimistic about the next general election. It seemed to me that our choice was between two jumped-up bank managers: grey Sunak and greyer Starmer.

Yet Sunak seems to be striking out. He has shown that he understands this country, and its people’s concerns, far more keenly than Sir Keir does.

Is this a new era of Sunak Conservatism? If he can hold his nerve, and go even further in countering the green religion and the woke crusade, it might well be.

The ‘Real Rishi’ could stir up the electorate. Let’s at least hope that the PM now recognises that populism – which simply means policies that are popular with the public – is no bad thing.

• Brendan O’Neill is chief political writer at Spiked.

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