Why Rishi Sunak quit

On Tuesday, the last cabinet meeting with Sajid Javid as health secretary and Rishi Sunak as chancellor passed without any hint that either was about to resign. The ministers did not co-ordinate their resignations, but they had both been tipped over the edge by growing evidence that No. 10 had misled MPs by declaring Boris Johnson had no prior knowledge of Chris Pincher’s behaviour. Sunak had also grown tired of the Prime Minister’s economic ‘cake-ism’ – the fantasy of wanting both high spending and low taxes. The contradictions had become untenable.

In that cabinet meeting, Johnson offered more cake. He was his usual ebullient self, promising a morale-raising speech to move on from recent woes. It was Michael Gove who confronted him. Now is the time for candour, he said, not misleading boosterism. Tackling inflation would be very painful so there’s no sense in pretending otherwise. And didn’t part of the problem rest around the cabinet table? ‘Fiscal Nimbyism,’ he called it. Ministers claim to love low taxes, but when spending cuts are suggested to make a low-tax economy possible, they all say: not in my department.

In Sunak’s resignation letter, in which he noted his ‘fundamentally different’ economic approach to the Prime Minister, he made it clear that he agrees with Gove. ‘Our people know that if something is too good to be true,’ he wrote, ‘then it’s not true.’ The highest spending in decades has been coupled with the highest tax burden in living memory. Sunak could no longer pretend otherwise. 

The prospect and pressure of a joint speech with Johnson is said to have also contributed to Sunak’s decision to resign: he was not interested in delivering feelgood remarks without substance behind them. He never has been. The former chancellor was notably the only minister at party conference last October not using the low-tax rallying cry with the base.