Former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has spoken publicly for the first time about the considerable relief he has experienced since the general election, confirming that no longer having to court Reform UK voters has been “genuinely transformative” for his mental health and general enjoyment of daily life.
Speaking from his North Yorkshire home, where he has spent the past six months reorganising his considerable portfolio of investments and teaching his daughters about compound interest, Sunak admitted that the eighteen months he spent attempting to appeal to people who thought he was part of a globalist conspiracy had been “possibly worse than my brief period working in hedge fund client relations, and I once had to spend an entire weekend in Düsseldorf”.
The former Chancellor, who rose to prominence during the pandemic by handing out money to people who then spent the next three years calling him a communist, said he could now finally acknowledge that he would rather discuss marginal tax rates with a lamppost than ever again pretend to be concerned about pronouns, net migration figures, or whether the RNLI had become too woke.
I spent months nodding along whilst being told that what Britain really needed was to bring back imperial measurements and leave the ECHR. I have an MBA from Stanford. My idea of rebellion is switching from Excel to Google Sheets.
According to sources close to the former PM, Sunak has been noticeably happier since leaving office, no longer required to pose awkwardly in high-visibility jackets or feign interest in the concerns of people who believed his wife’s non-dom status was somehow more offensive than the state of the NHS.
“The worst part was having to act like I understood the appeal of Nigel Farage,” Sunak explained, his voice taking on the weary quality of someone recounting a particularly difficult hostage situation. “I kept being told we needed to win back these voters, but every focus group just made me want to talk about fiscal responsibility until everyone left the room.”
Margaret Collins, a political consultant who worked with the Conservative campaign, confirmed that Sunak’s discomfort had been “painfully obvious” throughout. “We’d brief him on small boats messaging and you could see his soul leaving his body,” she said. “He’d start every meeting asking if we could talk about productivity metrics instead. It was like watching someone slowly die inside, but in a suit that cost more than my car.”
The former Prime Minister has since returned to what he describes as “actual interesting work”, which appears to consist largely of managing investments, giving speeches to financial services companies for sums that would make his parliamentary salary look like pocket money, and finally being able to admit that he thinks most political discourse is intellectually beneath him.
When asked whether he missed frontline politics, Sunak paused for what witnesses described as “an uncomfortably long time” before responding: “I miss the policy work. The spreadsheets. The intricate detail of pension reform. What I do not miss is having to pretend that the death of the high street is because of fifteen-minute cities rather than, I don’t know, Amazon and decades of planning policy failure.”
David Fletcher, a former special adviser, noted that Sunak had spent most of his final months in office looking like “a man counting down the days until he could return to discussing sensible things with sensible people”. “He once told me that having to take a position on whether we should rejoin the Imperial system of weights and measures made him understand why David Cameron buggered off to a shepherd’s hut,” Fletcher recalled.
Sunak confirmed he has no plans to return to frontline politics, citing his renewed ability to express opinions about economics without having to caveat them with promises to crack down on diversity training or investigate the BBC.