Is Rishi too rich to rule?

In Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Caesar says of Gaius Longinus Cassius, the chief conspirator: ‘Yon Cassius has a lean and hungry look: he thinks too much. Such men are dangerous’. None of the eight Tories fighting like ferrets in a sack to succeed our own fallen Caesar, Boris Johnson, looks leaner or hungrier than the former chancellor in his crisply laundered snow white shirt. But would what is beginning to look like his inevitable triumph as prime minister be good or dangerous for the Tory party, and the country at large?

Both supporters and opponents of Sunak might care to consider the case of John Major, the man who rose without trace and came from nowhere to succeed Margaret Thatcher in 1990, the last occasion when the Tory party tore itself apart after stabbing and deposing a serving prime minister. It is a cautionary tale.

Like Sunak, Major had held one of the great offices of state, the chancellorship, (he was also briefly foreign secretary), without making much impact on the public or tying himself to any particular party ideology.