As a British Asian of the same generation, intense feelings overwhelm me when I see Rishi Sunak cross the door into 10 Downing Street. All that envy and bitterness will pass, though.
The question then becomes what to expect from the youngest UK prime minister since Napoleonic times. There is much hope of a restoration of competence. There shouldn’t be. Yes, Sunak understood the folly of unfunded tax cuts at a time of fiscal and current account deficits. But that is not proof of a more general wisdom. This is still the man who subsidised people to dine out amid a pandemic with no vaccine in sight.
He has crammed a lot of misjudgments into a short career. Among the prime ministers since the EU referendum of 2016, two voted Remain (Theresa May, Liz Truss) and one (Boris Johnson) embraced Leave with the tardiness of an opportunist. Britain is now led for the first time by someone who believed with real fervour that Brexit was a good idea. The lost trade, the forfeited fiscal receipts: he failed to anticipate these costs, or overrated the ease of making them up elsewhere.
