Rishi Sunak: How the rising star suffered a meteoric fall – and what might come next

The former chancellor was doomed when he raised taxes, as he ‘basked in the adulation of the sensible people’, writes John Rentoul

Rishi Sunak had high hopes of taking over as leader of the Conservative party (EPA/PA)

Rishi Sunak’s campaign to be prime minister was over before it began. Too many Conservative Party members had their doubts about him. Two surveys of them were carried out on 7 July, the day Boris Johnson announced that he would stand down as prime minister.

In one by YouGov, Mr Sunak was five points behind Liz Truss in a series of possible head-to-head contests; in the other, by Opinium, he was four points ahead. This was before Conservative MPs were balloted to produce the shortlist of two, and many people, including me, assumed that support for Mr Sunak would grow as the campaign progressed. Instead, as he coasted through the MPs’ stage of the election to his place in the final two, opinion among party members was moving in the other direction.

We can see now, looking back at other YouGov polls carried out while MPs were voting, that not only was he likely to lose to Truss; he would probably have lost to Penny Mordaunt or Kemi Badenoch, if one of them had emerged as the other candidate in the final round.