The Shrinking of Rishi Sunak

A year into his ministry a traditional counsel of despair can be heard: "Let Rishi be Rishi".

Tough job, being Roman emperor. Consider the fate of poor Galba, successor to Nero and the first ruler in the Year of the Four Emperors (AD 68-69). The brevity of Galba’s tenure would mark him little more than a little-remembered placeholder were it not for Tactitus’s famous appraisal that such was Galba’s career and list of accomplishments that “Had he never been emperor, nobody would have doubted his ability to reign”. This judgement has proved sufficient to distinguish Galba from his lesser-known successors Otho and Vitellius; an unfortunate form of immortality, perhaps, but better, maybe, than nothing. 

Sometimes I wonder if there is a touch of Galba about Rishi Sunak. The prime minister is hard-working and detail-oriented and obviously intelligent but throughout his brief ministry there has been a sense of something absent too. He is not Boris Johnson and he is not Liz Truss and while that was enough for a while it is not, in the end, quite good enough to establish proper foundati…