A little over a week into his premiership Rishi Sunak has made his first major U-turn. On 2 November the prime minister announced that he would be travelling to Egypt for the Cop27 UN climate summit next week after all. No 10 had previously said he was too focused on fixing the domestic economy to attend. The U-turn is welcome. The initial decision was alarming not just because the climate emergency is one of the world’s most pressing concerns; there’s also the fact that at Cop27 the UK hands over the conference’s presidency to Egypt, and Sunak’s absence would have been a stark statement that Britain wasn’t capable of engaging on the world stage.
As Boris Johnson’s chancellor throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, Sunak built a reputation for dependability and pragmatism when it came to the economy and navigating a crisis (though, as the questionable “eat out to help out” policy amid rising Covid-19 rates in summer 2020 proved, perhaps that reputation isn’t entirely deserved). Yet there is much about Sunak, and his worldview, that remains unknown. This is a sharp contrast to his most recent predecessors in No 10. Johnson’s “cakeism” approach to dealing with the EU may not have been realistic but it was clear to everyone that his relationship with Brussels wouldn’t be amicable. Likewise, Liz Truss’s hawkish fantasies when it came to Russia left little doubt as to how she wanted to position the UK on the world stage. Sunak hasn’t been as forthright in setting out how he sees the world and Britain’s place in it.
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