Analysis: many Tory MPs are frustrated with the chancellor’s attitude to spending, and his focus on self-image
Rishi Sunak has spent 18 months in a honeymoon period as one of the UK’s youngest ever chancellors, riding high in public opinion mostly owing to a generous furlough scheme. He is serious, smooth and sleek, a teetotal family man – who makes an obvious counterpoint to Boris Johnson’s scruffy joviality.
But doubts are beginning to creep in on the right of the party following his big tax-and-spend budget that some felt more worthy of Gordon Brown than a supposed devotee of Margaret Thatcher and Nigel Lawson.
