Farage is wrong to question Sunak’s patriotism

It didn’t take long for Nigel Farage to weaponise Sunak’s D-Day debacle. ‘Rishi Sunak pops into Normandy but omits to go to the big international commemoration,’ he says in a pre-debate warmup video. ‘He doesn’t really care about our history. He doesn’t really care, frankly, about our culture…This man is not patriotic. Doesn’t believe in the country, its people, its history or frankly even its culture. If you’re a patriotic voter, don’t vote for Rishi Sunak.’

Jeremy Corbyn was frequently attacked for being unpatriotic but that’s more to do with his links with Sinn Fein and taking the non-British side in a few too many international disputes. It is absurd for anyone to question the patriotism of Sunak who, like Sajid Javid, is the son of immigrants who quit a very successful financial career in hope of giving back. Both of them went into politics in hope of doing what they could to make their own success stories less rare. Sunak has spoken repeatedly and movingly about the debt his family owes this country having pursued their British dream.

But Farage is trying to be inflammatory. The idea is to turn the conversation to the subject of your choice (Sunak’s patriotism) by making vile accusations that will get people talking by sheer shock factor. This is the Tump playbook, a standard populist election technique. Here’s his Sky News version of the same attack line.

So it’s perhaps worth mentioning what Sunak really did in the D-Day commemorations. Leaving early was a big miscalculation, for which he has apologised and I don’t demur from the critiques published on this website. But given that so much weight is being placed on what happened, it may help to put things in context. 

His programme of commemorations started in Portsmouth on Wednesday, where he welcomed the Prince of Wales to the D-Day ceremony and sat with the king. This was the event where the Queen wept. Sunak gave a reading: General Montgomery’s letter to the troops just before the invasion. He then met veterans and their families, others who read in the ceremony and servicemen and women. After that, there was lunch with veterans and their families – where he went to every single table.

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Sunak arrived at the British Normandy Memorial the next day and gave a speech, then headed to the British ceremony in the small coastal village of Ver-sur-Mer. The PM addressed veterans and their families, greeted Emmanuel Macron and walked down with him. Both then went to the memorial and spent half an hour meeting veterans: Sunak offered to wheel one of them through the memorial. After that, he and his wife spent an hour with veterans in a tent: again, they went to every single table. Finally, Sunak and the King went to unveil a plaque at the newly-opened Churchill Centre, part of the Memorial. Yet again, he was talking to veterans whilst they waited for the king to arrive. 

The British side of the ceremony then concluded. The King left. Sunak (fatally) followed soon after. The international ceremony in Omaha beach in the afternoon then was far more developed than No10 had originally believed. David Cameron stayed and the resulting photos are, now, notorious: a foreign secretary, standing next to three G7 world leaders while his boss was in London being interviewed by ITV. Sunak didn’t go back for the interview: skipping the afternoon ceremony (which No. 10 had been told would not be attended by any veterans) was always Sunak’s plan, set before he called the election. ‘I stuck to the itinerary that had been set for me weeks ago,’ he said in his Sky News apology. ‘On reflection, it was a mistake not to stay longer – and I’ve apologised for that. But I also don’t think it’s right to be political in the middle of D-Day veterans.’

Would it have been ‘political’ to change his itinerary,? Of course not. The big mystery is the Foreign Office. It is very good at diplomatic protocol and will have been able to alert No10 when the afternoon event quickly became a Macron-Sholtz-Biden-UK photocall. The FCO know the disrespect implied in sending a Foreign Secretary to meet three G7 world leaders. If Zelensky could make that ceremony while fighting a war for his country’s survival, Sunak could surely spare an afternoon. Did the election (and purdah) somehow stop this being pointed out to him? And what about Cameron, who knows a thing or two about campaign mistakes. Did he try to have a quiet word with Sunak? Or had he stopped caring and happily accept his last photocall with world leaders?

Sunak believes in speaking through actions, and is more interested in policy than the ceremonial aspects of the job. Underestimating the importance of optics and ceremony may have been his undoing here. When it comes to policy, he has an extensive veterans’ agenda; his wife works for such charities – his actions, for veterans, are not in doubt. Perhaps actions should speak louder than ceremonies. But in politics, they don’t – as Sunak will now indelibly learn.

But to stretch this misjudgement into proof that Sunak somehow doesn’t care about Britain’s history, people or culture is a revolting slur impossible to reconcile with the Prime Minister’s policies, record and character. Farage really should be ashamed.