Rishi Sunak’s instructor offers PM a fail as he reveals he’s voting Labour

Rishi Sunak’s old teacher has given his former pupil a fail – and revealed he is voting Labour.

Nick MacKinnon is backing Sir Keir Starmer ’s party at the election to punish the PM for betraying the British people over Brexit. The Tory leader’s maths teacher at £49,152-a-year Winchester College regarded Sunak as “a good boy”.

But now he says of the 44-year-old PM: “I don’t know how he sleeps at night after knowingly putting a slow puncture in UK PLC.” The prize-winning poet also blasted Sunak’s newly-unveiled National Service policy as an “opportunistic punt” to garner support among pensioners.

Mr MacKinnon worked at the 642-year-old Hampshire boarding school — to which Sunak and his wife have donated over £100,000 — from 1986 until 2020. He continues to tutor maths, English and Medieval history and has taken a keen interest in Sunak’s political career.

Mr MacKinnon told the Mirror : “I remember him only as a boy at the back of class, I recall little about him as a pupil but his achievements at Winchester are not in dispute. He was a good boy, he was head of school and the first non white head of school in 600 years at that.

“He was a very good boy and I am sorry for the way he has turned out, which was to become wildly opportunistic.”

Mr MacKinnon finds Sunak’s backing of Brexit “completely unforgivable”. He said: “For me Brexit is completely unforgivable, his support for it was purely self serving. He knew to a single new penny how much it would cost but he put his career in the Conservative Party ahead of that and supported it.

“Some of his Conservative colleagues were maniacs like Truss or opportunists like Boris Johnson, but Sunak knew, he has a high level of understanding and they didn’t. You have to understand that Rishi Sunak is wired into the world’s financial systems, he is highly tuned and gifted and he knew what the impact would be but still he still followed that route.

“So many people voted for Brexit who had no idea what they were voting for, they didn’t understand, but he cannot claim that. It is a slow puncture in UK PLC and it is going to take at least 20 years to get out of this mess.”

Mr MacKinnon, who lives at a converted farm on the moors above Haworth in West Yorkshire’s Bronte Country, says he is not a Conservative voter — but his Labour election vote will be pointedly against Sunak.

He said: “I will be voting for Labour against Sunak. In my mind he has to be punished by my one tiny little vote, but that’s what I will do. It is a punishment vote for Brexit. If I had done what he did over Brexit I would be struggling to get to sleep every night. It should be on his conscience because it is actually tragic.”

In an election push, the Tories last week revealed a plan to force 18-year-olds into military or voluntary work as part of a new National Service policy. But Mr MacKinnon said: “His idea about bringing back National Service is interesting but I think it is nothing more than an opportunistic punt for the over 80s vote, which a strange and small demographic to pitch to.

“But it has to be them because no one else is old enough to have any clear idea of what benefits it could possibly bring. Perhaps his idea was in some way influenced by his school days because he was in the CCF (Combined Cadet Force) at Winchester, it was a compulsory thing for all pupils.

“They would spend each Wednesday for a year doing drills and exercises and so on and then there was the option of continuing it into community service but I don’t know whether he took that up.”

Sunak has previously said of his Winchester education: “I was really lucky to have that opportunity. It was something that was really extraordinary, it certainly put my life on a different trajectory.”

After Sunak announced his candidacy to become Tory leader in 2022, a cringe-worthy clip was unearthed of him when he was younger. In the video, from a 2001 BBC series, a young Sunak says: “I have friends who are aristocrats, I have friends who are upper class, I have friends who are… working class… Well, not working class.”

In 2019, former Tory MP Rory Stewart poked fun at the then PM Boris Johnson by reading out a 1982 letter about him penned by his Eton housemaster. The letter to Johnson’s father, Stanley, said: “Boris really has adopted a disgracefully cavalier attitude to his classical studies.”

The Tory Party was contacted for comment.