Rishi Sunak at No. 10: a triumph for diversity?

Britain’s first non-white and first Hindu prime minister “has arrived to little fanfare”, said Sunny Hundal in the FT. Most Conservatives welcomed Rishi Sunak as PM, while suggesting that his background was largely irrelevant. Many on the left “cautiously celebrated the broken glass ceiling”, but said that – since Sunak and his wife have a joint fortune of about £730m – he was “too rich to be representative”.

Yet you only have to look around to see what a remarkable moment it is. Across the world, democracies “pay lip-service to diversity”, but “resist it fiercely in practice”. Britain, by contrast, is a genuinely successful multicultural democracy.

“Global perception lags behind the quietly transformed British reality,” said Fraser Nelson in The Daily Telegraph. In the US, The Daily Show released a “Between the Scenes” video stating that a “racist backlash” would follow Sunak’s arrival in No. 10. But it didn’t. There was no fuss at all about Sunak’s ethnicity – a silence that “speaks volumes”.

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Still, we should not pretend that this is a seminal moment for racial equality, said Nesrine Malik in The Guardian. Britain will be a successful multicultural nation when people from ethnic minorities are freed from “poverty and social exclusion” – not when one very rich, right-wing person gains “a seat at the high table”.

Yet we are all expected to cheer on this supposed triumph for diversity. The Labour whip ordered Nadia Whittome, a Labour MP, to delete a tweet saying Sunak’s appointment wasn’t a “win” for Asian representation, because his policies punish working people, whether “black, white or Asian”.

“Personally, I dislike Sunak’s politics,” said Sonia Sodha in The Observer. Even so, it’s churlish not to accept that his rise to the top is an important moment. “Of course it matters that children can today see that you don’t have to be white to lead this country.” There’s an “ugly strain” of left-wing thought that holds that Conservative values aren’t “compatible with being brown or black”. But three in ten British Indians support the Tories.

Sunak’s premiership can help repair “Britain’s rundown reputation”, said Ben Judah in the London Evening Standard. In recent years, the sight of Boris Johnson mumbling “colonial Kipling verse” in Myanmar, or Liz Truss revealing ignorance of Russia’s borders on her Moscow trip, “confirmed the worst stereotypes of a shrivelled empire”.

But the photo of King Charles III, grandson of the last emperor of India, shaking his PM’s hand sent a message of “enormous power” about a changing Britain. Sunak now has a “historic chance” to restore the UK’s image abroad: “he should lean in”.