When Sir Graham Brady read out Liz Truss’s name today, confirming her as Britain’s new Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak’s smile didn’t crack. Whether it broke his heart a little, we cannot know; professional until the end, he showed no trace of disappointment.
For all his affability, Sunak, who received 42 per cent of the final vote to Truss’s 57, must know what we all knew at the start of the Tory leadership contest. For the winner, the highest office in the land; for the loser, not a silver medal, but a millstone: the curse, perhaps of life, of being thought of as “an almost man.” It is an injury added to the insult; Sunak, like Truss, has come under relentless scrutiny and criticism in recent weeks. Even dawn pistol duels, banned almost 200 years ago, seem somehow more humane than a Tory leadership choice.
Sunak’s life, as far as we know, until then had been golden with success. He went from Winchester College to Oxford, from Oxford to Stanford as a Fulbright scholar, and from there to a lucrative career in finance. He and his wife, Akshata Murty, have a combined fortune of £730 million. Sunak was elected to the House of Commons in 2015, and became chancellor, dizzyingly, just five years later. During the pandemic, he was the most popular politician in the government.
But in one way or another, failure affects us all. Every human mind harbors an overlapping multitude of tightly held or loosely held dreams and ambitions. We cannot realize all of them, especially those that force us to compete with rivals of equal vigor.
What about Sunak? What can save his defeat? And the rest of us? If there are lessons to be learned from losing a leadership election, perhaps we can drink them without having to thwart our own ambitions in front of the nation.
Jacqueline Hurst is a certified life coach who has worked with more than 7,000 clients, many of them high achievers who might have something in common with Sunak. Hurst, author of How to Do You, questions whether Sunak should see his election loss as a failure. Failure, he says, does not exist. “Look at Serena Williams. She hasn’t gotten to where she’s gotten by winning every match; she’s had to lose some matches to get there.
“So I don’t really believe in that big word, failure: ‘Oh my God, it’s a failure.’ There’s no such thing as failure. Because every time things don’t go according to plan, there’s a bigger reason behind it. that. And there’s always something better that comes out of it. There’s always growth in this space.”
You don’t have to believe that everything happens for a reason, as the saying goes, to accept that there are different ways of looking at setbacks. “Either you look at your life,” says Hurst, “and you go, ‘Oh my God, I failed here and I failed there,’ and you sit in the negative mindset, or you can use it to make a springboard, to become— you into a smarter person. And that’s a choice you make.”
If Sunak sat across from her, Hurst would say: “First of all, good on you for going into something as massive as this. And secondly, not making it might not be a bad thing.”
Sunak is hardly short of options. He could stay in politics, poised for another tilt at the leadership if Liz Truss’s government is voted out in 2024 after a bruising couple of years grappling with existing crises (cost of living, energy, housing , Ukraine, etc.) and crises still pending. arise In that case, Sunak could come to see this year’s leadership election as a hospital pass he was lucky not to receive.
He could leave politics entirely, perhaps to take up a lucrative role as an adviser to a bank or, as Nick Clegg has done, to a big tech company. Sunak, having been the recipient of one of David Cameron’s texts on behalf of the now bankrupt financial firm Greensill Capital, may not choose to follow the former prime minister in lobbying. But I could also point to the many post-political lives of George Osborne, who at the time of writing had nine jobs: university professor, newspaper editor, bank adviser, chairman of the British Museum, hotshot, tailor, soldier , rather spiteful commentator. to Theresa May since leaving government in 2016. Other interesting post-ministerial careers include Tristram Hunt’s directorship of the V&A, David Miliband’s chairmanship of the International Rescue Committee, Tony Blair’s spectacular career in mental gymnastics and the contribution immortal by Ed Balls on Strictly Come Dancing. “There’s a million things I could do,” Hurst says of Sunak.
Liz Truss shuts down shortly after becoming Britain’s new Prime Minister
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For now, Hurst says, Sunak has to ask himself the following. “‘What are the lessons I’ve learned here? Are there things I should have learned? And I’m sure there will be, because we always learn from these experiences. ‘And what do I do with this new learning? Where do I go next? ‘
“Let’s say he ends up in the next role he’s doing and he loves that role. He’ll look back and say, ‘Thank God something else didn’t happen.'”
Of these realizations, and one wonders if the tortuous, goldfish life of a Prime Minister is that much worse than Sunak’s more lucrative and pro-social alternatives, Hurst says: “You might not see it immediately. But you will with the weather – the weather is very good for things like this.”
To those who think they have failed, Hurst advocates a change in mindset. They don’t happen immediately, though; they require hard work. It is not enough to agree with the idea that setbacks are part of success; the idea must be ingested both emotionally and intellectually. “They don’t teach us this stuff in school, and I wish they did,” says Hurst. “The first step, and I don’t want to sound la-la, is about awareness and being aware of what you’re really thinking. We don’t know what we’re thinking most of the time we’re walking around oblivious and unconscious. So the first step is to ask yourself: “What am I thinking? And that may take a while.”
The second step, he says, “is telling yourself, ‘I have a choice.’ If I think negative, that will still make me feel negative.” Your mind is the most powerful muscle in your entire body when you learn to use it properly and ask yourself these questions. ‘How do I want to think this?’ It’s one of my favorite questions.”
Hurst doesn’t want to speculate on Sunak’s personality or level of resilience, but believes he, like anyone, will benefit from the support of family and friends. I could look for classic examples of people who have turned failure into success; in addition to Williams, Hurst cites Walt Disney, Oprah Winfrey and the Wright brothers. Losing, he says, teaches us more than winning.
What Rishi Sunak may or may not do in the foreseeable future
(AFP/Getty)
Hurst has his own recovery story; after a difficult childhood, she became a drug addict. It was only when she recovered from addiction that she decided to become a life coach. “That’s definitely something I don’t see as a failure,” he says of that period in his life. “I got 19 clean last week, and getting clean, all that stuff, is a big part of who I became.”
From his clients, Hurst hears countless stories of what might be called failures or, more constructively, setbacks. Lost Promotions Dating lovers Companies do not leave the ground. Hurst imagines someone whose coffee shop closed during the pandemic. “It’s been blood, sweat and tears all day, and they’ve said, ‘Well, this isn’t working.’ That’s it. And they’ve gone back to wherever, maybe Italy, and now they’re with their family, they’ve met nice and they have a baby. And that wouldn’t happen if they were still here. So that’s what I’m saying: There’s always a bigger picture.”
It is not true that things always go well. We benefit from the success of the scientists who created mRNA vaccines; we will shiver this winter as a result of not being able to build more nuclear power plants. But success and failure are often much less clear.
The human mind, so powerfully disposed to storytelling, is quicker than we think to find meaning in endeavors we never imagined we were pursuing. The hedonic tape turns faster than we imagine. Rishi Sunak won’t be prime minister, but maybe he’ll end up happier for it.