Rishi Sunak has khanucked all our smug political assumptions about ‘racist’, ‘imperialist’ Britain

One of the books that enthralled and tormented me as a university student was Alan Sillitoe’s The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. It is the story of an English working-class boy, Colin Smith, who is incarcerated in a borstal (juvenile prison).

He is a brilliant runner and the governor of the borstal thinks to use Smith to highlight the success of his rehabilitation programme. The moment comes with a race against a posh nearby school. Colin pulls way ahead but refuses to cross the line for that would legitimise the governor’s brutal disciplinary practices and class prejudice.

The thought of running a race but deliberately not winning is jarring. Muhammad Ali was filled to the brim with principles but he fought to win. If Jesse Owens pulled up just before the tape, what would that prove to the watching Nazis?

I read Sillitoe when I was one of the first batch of “non-white” students at Rhodes University. Should I get top marks in my essays but refuse to take the final examination because I wanted to expose the segregated residences of the university and that I had to study there under a permit? It just didn’t make sense. Would it not be more effective to outperform the white people?

In my case, I failed three consecutive essays in African history so I never got to do a Colin Smith, let alone a Jesse Owens. I was canny enough though to dress my failure up in the Marxist-speak of class suicide and the racism of my lecturers who, unlike my mother, I surmised, could not instantly and unconditionally recognise genius.

These thoughts bring us to race winner Rishi Sunak. We know from Sillitoe and George Orwell, and more recently Kazuo Ishiguro, all about the workings of the English class system. One gets daily reminders about it in the rants of the “tofu-eating, Guardian-reading wokerati”.

We know about the conveyor belt of privilege. With minimal exertion, future prime ministers from top private schools roll into Oxbridge and then, via a big finance house, into Downing Street. The epitome and nadir both of white privilege.

Read more in Daily Maverick: “Briturkey, Britaly and right-wing fear of Britainistan — Rishi Sunak inherits the new ‘sick man of Europe’”

What does a recent pilgrim to Mud Island, like Rishi’s parents, do to give their son the best shot at the top. Their boy is Asian, Hindu, and with a nose that spells trouble. One lesson they quickly learn is to avoid a local government school where their slightly built progeny will be mercilessly picked upon as a “Paki”, his sacrosanct red string removed and his confidence shattered.   

So, young Rishi is sent to a top school like Winchester to straighten out the creases but keep the faith. This is where he separates somewhat from the herd. Usually what happens is that a cultural outsider is increasingly deracinated, his name mutates to Richie and acculturates by self-deprecating his paganism.  

Rishi, though, while adopting the sartorial accoutrements of the English gentleman (remember Churchill’s Gandhi gibe about the “half-naked fakir”?) is a practising Hindu. The local paper for Indians in South Africa, The Post, led with the headline “Britain’s first Hindu Prime Minister”.  From the first Asian, Sunak soon became the first Hindu occupant of No 10. Someone swore they even saw him levitate when greeted by adoring Conservative Party MPs.

Hilarious memes ensued. Shoes outside No 10 guarded by an Asian policeman in brown uniform with laathi (stick) in hand. First meal at Downing Street, eating with hands out of a banana leaf.

It seems that me and most of my friends brought up on a diet of critiques of colonialism and apartheid got it wrong. When the Tories voted for Truss instead of Sunak we wrote that “the Brits are not ready for a brown man”. When he was voted in, as lefties, we trundled out explanation “B”. He is a puppet of the whites, an MI6 plant, white capital’s butler, a coconut like Obama.

Considered opinion pieces explaining the Sunak phenomenon fare no better. In The Guardian of 26 October, veteran journalist Mihir Bose tries an angle under the banner headline “Sunak’s rise is thanks to the Tory Hindu Revolution. Labour, look and learn”.

Bose, a sports journalist, writes about the Hindu vote as if it is soccer’s Premier League: “At the 2010 election, Labour had a 13% lead among Hindus … by the 2015 election, the Tories had gone 8% ahead among Hindus…”

Bose spills a lot of ink stating the obvious, “that Sunak does not represent all Asians”. He tells us that the first Asians are those who came directly from the subcontinent and went into the factories of the North. Sunak comes from a different wave. From East Africa.

Read more  in Daily Maverick: “Sunak faces dose of reality as economic and political woes mount”

Bose holds that, unlike Labour, it was Edward Heath’s Tory government that allowed Ugandan Asians to settle in the UK in 1972. “It is the children of these East African Asians who have done well, and particularly the Hindus: about two-thirds of Hindu men are in managerial and professional jobs, but only about a third of Muslim men … Labour has often given the impression that it still sees the Asian community as a homogenous one, when, as Sunak’s rise shows, it is more complex. It needs to learn from the Tories how to court the various divergent sections of Asian communities if it is not to see Sunak and his party further mine the Asian gold it has found.”

But how would a Rishi Sunak arise in the Labour party? His biography and values can only appeal to conservatives. He is a child of migrants who, in one generation, rose to the top. He did so by marrying and schooling well. Sunak eschews the solidarity of other “victims” of a racially rigged culture. The system works for him. Race can be trumped. His religious devotions don’t impede him much, they can even be a political turn-on.

Subtle stirring