Rishi Sunak revealed something shocking in an interview in Bali

I thought he was a good prime minister – but then Sunak said he’s a Beatles fan, writes John Rentoul

Sunak is my kind of centrist. He even sounds like Tony Blair (POOL/AFP/Getty)

As a Blairite, I have long thought that Rishi Sunak was the best of the available Conservative leadership candidates. He put up taxes to pay for the NHS. He even chose the same tax that Tony Blair and Gordon Brown put up to pay for the NHS in 2002: national insurance. What is not to like?

Sunak’s response to the coronavirus recession was pretty much what would have been expected of Brown if he had been chancellor at the time. The big, bold use of what Sunak called “the overwhelming might of the British state” to save people’s jobs with the furlough scheme and business support: it was so Gordon that I could imagine Tony, if he had been prime minister at the time, complaining that it was too left wing.

Sunak is my kind of centrist. He even sounds like Tony Blair: a pleasant timbre, a demotic-posh accent and the plain English of Bipartisan Reasonableness.

Naturally, I was cast down when he tried to tell Conservative Party members what they didn’t want to hear, which sounded terribly reasonable to me but which, naturally enough, they didn’t like. I assumed that his career was over; that Liz Truss would be a disaster in office; but I assumed it would take longer for reality to impose itself than it did. By then, I assumed that a new candidate would have emerged and that Sunak would have been forgotten.

So I was surprised and pleased when the checks and balances of the unwritten constitution kicked in, and Truss was kicked out. No one seemed more surprised than a stunned Sunak, who was put in front of a camera in Conservative HQ and seemed to have forgotten, in seven short weeks, how to speak naturally.

He has only been there a few weeks, and there have been fumbles. He appointed Suella Braverman as home secretary; he disappointed Gavin Williamson as minister without portfolio; he said he wasn’t going to the climate summit in Egypt before he said he was. But these seemed to me the mistakes of normal politics – the sort of media hoo-ha that Blair had to endure most weeks, many of which were written up as the worst week since a previous one.

On the big decisions on tax and spending, Sunak seemed to be getting the balance broadly right. He was assailed by Trusses and Kwartengs of left and right for not spending more or taxing less, but as we had just had a vivid real-world experiment in spending more and taxing less, most of the evidence-based community seemed to accept the necessary sacrifices, and to regard the burden as fairly shared.

Today came the bolt from the blue. The news from the other side of the world. In one of a series of interviews at the G20 meeting in Bali, Indonesia, the prime minister told Darren McCaffrey of GB News that his favourite band is the Beatles.

Now, this may require some explanation. I don’t go on about it, because I don’t like being negative. For me, every day is positive Twitter day. But I don’t like the Beatles. It is simply a matter of taste. Who can explain why they like this music and not that music?

The Beatles were part of the musical furniture when I was younger; I thought they were all right; one or two catchy tunes. But even then, when tribalists had to like either the Beatles or the Stones, I preferred the Stones. Since then I just never listened to them.

Nine years ago, I compiled a Top 10 Worst Beatles Songs (the very worst was “Across the Universe”, since you ask), and realised that, although those 10 were bad, I didn’t actually like any of the others either. I think I heard a cover of “Dear Prudence” once that I thought was all right. And Paul McCartney strikes me as a thoroughly wonderful human being. But no. I don’t like the Beatles’ music.

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So, sorry Rishi Sunak. This is as far as we go together. I’m not saying Keir Starmer’s musical taste is aligned with mine, but he has never said he likes the Beatles. He chose a strange-sounding track by a band called Orange Juice for his Desert Island Discs, which sounded like the authentic racket of a misspent youth, and some other boring stuff, but no Beatles.

And if I am faced with a choice between a pro-Beatles centrist and a non-Beatles centrist, then Starmer gets the nod, I am afraid.

This is slightly complicated by the fact that Tony Blair did say that he liked the Beatles. But in his case, I put that down to a postmodern self-mocking commentary on the banality of the packaging of a politician of the time: “I am a modern man,” he said in a pre-election speech in 1997, “from the rock’n’roll generation. The Beatles, colour TV, that’s my generation.”

He had subtly undermined himself by saying, when he was asked in an earlier interview which bands he liked: “All the bands that everybody loves.”

Well, quite. He obviously didn’t mean it. But I don’t think Sunak does postmodern irony. He really does like the Beatles. He has lost my vote.