Rishi Sunak has found it impossibly difficult to reverse a major change in public opinion. Photo: Daniel Leal/PA
If Rishi Sunak could spare four hours to watch 84-year-old Sir Ian McKellen play Falstaff in London's West End, he would have a powerful reminder not only of the longevity of some careers, but also of how uncomfortable some are with the wearing a crown. .
By many accounts, Sunak is grappling with the prospect that his brief spell as a Conservative crown will come to a chilling end this autumn.
It has led to a new series of stories of bad mood in Downing Street, including outbursts of Sunak grumpiness and irritability, sometimes manifested in interviews in which he expresses annoyance at his interviewer's stupidity.
He would not be the first to suffer from the impatience of office.
It was Roy Jenkins who once wisely observed that the first mark of a successful Prime Minister is not a first-class mind, but a first-rate temperament. Too many Prime Ministers have eaten themselves and complained about the public's inability to see how their government is self-evidently achieving what it set out to do. That Sunak wants others to see his leadership as he thinks it deserves is debilitating, but not unusual.
One of the great exceptions is James Callaghan, 'Sunny Jim', who during the 1979 election campaign - fought in the shadow of the winter of discontent - hoped that the polls would turn around, but regretfully admitted to Bernard Donoughue, his policy advisor: 'there one of those great changes in public opinion may have taken place. If people have really decided that they want a change of government, there is nothing you can do."
But such phlegmatism is rare, partly because of the way the position distances the prime minister from the electorate. Lord Tebbit, the great Thatcherite, remembers the door closing behind his hero as she entered No. 10 for the first time, and 'immediately the windows, which look rather large from the outside, began to shrink, making those inside less visible from the outside world. the famous red boxes grow around the Prime Minister".
Tony Blair admitted in an interview during Covid that losing self-awareness is one of the biggest risks of high office. For example, he said the Covid pandemic meant it was the first time he had stayed in the same place in 30 years: 'The reality is the last time I drove was the day before the 1997 election. I always thought that being in power was a conspiracy to make you as abnormal as possible because of the life you lead."
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Two temperamental qualities that Blair possessed as Prime Minister were the ability to appear normal to the outside world, and in his inner world he had a knack for compartmentalizing issues. "He rarely took a crisis to the next meeting," says one of his aides.
And while he wanted the best possible media coverage for his government, after three election victories he was not consumed by the issue.
John Major, on the other hand, admitted that, against all his instincts and plans, he became far too sensitive to what the press wrote. He told the Leveson inquest: "God knows why I was, but I was. It's a basic human emotion to get a little sloppy about it. My overreaction was mainly a human overreaction." Above all, he did not recognize himself in what he read.
Prime Ministers also often discover that once in power they are less powerful than they thought, and that they pull levers and push buttons in vain. Sir Douglas Jay, for example, compared Clement Attlee less to 'a general ordering his troops across the countryside', and 'more to a cornered animal or a climber on a cliff that can neither go up nor down'.
What's worse is that a single defining event transforms and solidifies the public mood, leaving the occupant of Number 10 doomed and increasingly frustrated as he lurches from one strategy to another to appeal to a public that has seemingly closed its mind for revaluation.
Major never recovered from being excluded from the Exchange Rate Mechanism in September 1992 during his second term, and in retrospect he should have acted on the resignation letter he had drafted. He would not disagree with Tebbit's description of the irreversible damage of the ERM episode: "For some 30 years leading up to Black Wednesday, Gallup's monthly tracking polls asked respondents which party they saw as the most competent to manage the economy. Only once in all those years has the answer been Labour. In the twelve years since Black Wednesday, the answer has only been the Conservatives once."
But it left Major, like Sunak, increasingly furious with the 'bastards' in his Cabinet who he believed were dragging him down. One of his assistants remembers: "The moment you think there are tricks to be played, or that someone in the party would behave, and only afterwards, on second thought, you realize that it was all pointless. But that's after the fact. At the time, the human instinct was to think it could be saved or to blame someone else."
No one was better at blaming someone else, at least for her death, than Lady Thatcher. The diarist and MP Alan Clark remembers seeing her at Elba's equivalent shortly after her dismissal. "Her sense of betrayal is absolute; dominates everything. [Norman] Lamont had made plans, [Chris] Patten set up the whole thing. Kenneth Clarke had led the flight from the Cabinet room. [Malcolm] Rifkind was a weasel. Even John Major is certainly not cloud-free.
"I remembered a comment Tebbit once made to her in private: 'Prime Minister, it is you who choose the cabinet.'"
Theresa May had her own problems with her cabinet, especially with the undisciplined Boris Johnson, and the hard-line Brexit-supporting press, but Downing Street, at least for the last two years with Gavin Barwell as chief of staff, dealt with them with equanimity. She also had the wisdom to recognize when her time was up.
The only real argument she had with Barwell was when she blamed herself for the bubble up in her resignation speech.
But if there is one recent prime minister whom Sunak most resembles, it is Gordon Brown. Both are decent, highly intelligent, policy-minded, and work all the hours God provides, plus overtime.
Of course, Brown visibly struggled with the demands of office. Friends say he was harder on himself than anyone, and suffered from congenital disorganization. Cupboards in hotels were moved to hide wall marks caused by office equipment projectiles hurled by the frustrated prime minister.
Sunak's irritation with the world, on the other hand, seems mild; a low, faint whine against a brooding volcano. But Brown almost fought his way back into the government, which had entrenched itself in Downing Street five days after the election, seeking a coalition. For Sunak, it appears there has been a massive change of heart, and there is nothing he - or any Tory - can do to reverse it.
