Honest Rishi gambles his future on telling uncomfortable truths

WE ALL lie. It’s useful. Mostly we don’t even think of it as lying. A colleague passes in the corridor: “How are you?” they say. “Fine,” you respond, every time. Sometimes you’re not. Sometimes things are terrible.

But who wants you bawling on about that?

Rishi Sunak and the public have just passed in the corridor. But the Chancellor has not replied “fine” and walked on. He has stopped, turned, sighed, swallowed, batted his eyelashes and embarked on a tearful assessment of the nation’s finances. Fine? Fine!? You must be out of your mind, he wails.

All of which puts the public in a bit of a spot. Are we meant to pause, open wide our arms, praise the emotional courage required to speak out, and enfurl Rishi in our embrace? Or do we hop from foot to foot, frankly embarrassed at this outbreak of economic oversharing, then scuttle away as quickly as possible to relay rumours of Rishi’s toe-curling breakdown to everyone at the coffee machine? Is honesty truly the best policy for a Chancellor in charge of finances this bad? We will find out. But what is clear now is that the Chancellor has just taken the biggest political decision of his career. After a year of largely technocratic money-hosing, he has framed himself as the voice of economic rectitude.

In his party and beyond, there will be three reactions to this, on which Sunak’s career may hang. The first will be from those who praise his attitude and welcome the tax-hiking consequences. The second will be those who praise his attitude but privately curse the tax hikes, and the third will be those who curse both.

The problem for the Chancellor is that the number who fall into each of those categories will depend largely on how the economy performs. In other words his future ascent, so assured, so smoothly stage-managed in slick Treasury videos until yesterday, is now to a great degree out of his hands.

Right now, though, Category 1 is unlikely to be bursting at the seams.

He may want to reflect on the fate of Joe Darby, the US soldier who handed investigators awful pictures of his comrades in arms abusing Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib jail after the 2003 invasion. For more than a month before he did so, Darby wrestled with whether to come clean. Eventually, the sheer severity of the situation compelled him.

The decision changed his life. A few of the soldiers in his unit congratulated him. He won an award for courage. But many shunned him as “a traitor” and in America he and his family finally had to move into protective custody. The messenger was all but shot.

The irony, of course, is that Sunak serves in a government led by Boris Johnson, and thus is reminded everyday that megaphoning uncomfortable truths is not the sine qua non of career advancement.

So is he setting himself up in stern opposition to the endless sunlit uplands stuff that pours out of No 10, or in tandem with it? For a politician who can seem as desperate to replace the PM as Brown was Blair, such positioning will be all important. But for his party it doesn’t matter. The chief talent of the Conservative Party in recent years has been the ability to adapt to circumstance. Now, like a penny-pinching libertine, it has a foot in both camps.

His future ascent, so smoothly stage-managed in slick videos, is now to a great degree out of his hands