For Nigel Farage to counsel Rishi Sunak is just not patriotic is actually vile

Nigel Farage is a master of political phrase-making. The majority shareholder of the company known as Reform UK Ltd understands better than any of his rivals how to use words to trigger sentiments — all the way from anger to enmity.

So Farage knew precisely what he was doing when, last week, he said of Rishi Sunak: ‘This man is not patriotic. Doesn’t believe in the country, its people, its history or frankly even its culture. If you’re a patriotic voter, don’t vote for Rishi Sunak.’

These remarks (addressed, in unvarying form, to a number of television audiences) followed the Prime Minister’s fateful decision to leave the D-Day 80th anniversary commemoration after attending all the events involving British veterans over two days, but skipping the ‘international’ section, which culminated in a photo-opportunity for the world’s media on Omaha Beach.

It was the Foreign Secretary, Lord Cameron, who was pictured — looking as if he knew it should not be him there — alongside the American and French Presidents and the German Chancellor.

If this was an insult to anyone, it was to the American people; it was their army that had fought heroically on that beach in 1944, sustaining thousands of casualties in the first days of the land campaign to liberate Europe from Nazi rule.

Rishi Sunak lays a wreath during the UK Ministry of Defence and the Royal British Legion’s commemorative ceremony marking the 80th anniversary of D-Day landings in Normandy

Last week, Nigel Farage said Mr Sunak is ‘not patriotic’ and ‘doesn’t believe in the country, its people, its history or frankly even its culture’

But weeks before the Election had been called, Number 10 had decided the Prime Minister would leave after the specifically British ceremonies, at the same time as the King. The monarch is suffering from cancer, and so his doctors are, above all, concerned to avoid depleting his energy still further.

By contrast, there was no good reason for Sunak to leave when he did, and it added to the sense of calamitous misjudgment that he used some of the time saved to film an ITN election interview to be broadcast days later. Even in campaigning terms, it would have been most beneficial for the Prime Minister to have been pictured on that beach in Northern France alongside other world leaders.

But since Farage — alone among Sunak’s political opponents — has accused him of being ‘unpatriotic’, it’s worth recording what the PM had done over those days of commemoration in Portsmouth and France, aside from the televised sections in which we saw him alongside the King, and where he read out the letter which Field Marshal Montgomery had written to our troops ahead of the D-Day landings.

As Fraser Nelson reported in The Spectator: ‘He then met veterans and their families, others who read in the ceremony and servicemen and servicewomen. After that there was lunch with the veterans and their families — where he went to every single table.’

Samantha Davidson was at that Portsmouth event with her 100-year-old grandfather Alfred, a D-Day survivor. She told The Times: ‘[Sunak] and his wife spent loads of time with each of the veterans. And they seemed really genuine.’

The Prime Minister has come under fire for leaving the D-Day anniversary ceremony early 

Mr Sunak and his wife Akshata Murty speak to the Queen at the commemorative D-Day event earlier last week

As Nelson went on to report, the next day at Ver-sur-Mer, the Prime Minister addressed veterans and their families, and offered to wheel one of them through the memorial. ‘After that, he and his wife spent an hour with veterans in a tent.’

This helps explain why Nelson (who spent most of his childhood on military bases, as his father was in the RAF) described as ‘a revolting slur’ Farage’s claim that Sunak is ‘unpatriotic’ and has no care for our history.

In reality, Sunak is the first PM to have a veterans minister in the cabinet — the former Army officer Johnny Mercer, who has devoted himself to this cause.

In the wake of last week’s debacle, Mercer said: ‘Everyone who actually knows Rishi knows how this moment is not reflective of his views on veterans.’

Mercer accused previous Conservative PMs of having only ‘performative’ concerns for veterans, which is why he ‘left government twice’ — and contrasted that with Sunak’s ‘unflinching and consistent commitment’.

So why did Sunak absent himself from the Omaha Beach event? I can offer part of an explanation, based on a breakfast I had with him at 11 Downing Street on January 19, 2022.

This was the day that, in the House of Commons, the Conservative MP David Davis called on Boris Johnson to resign over parties at Number 10 during lockdown: ‘In the name of God, go.’

In this atmosphere, I had naturally asked the then Chancellor if he aspired to become Prime Minister. He replied (I kept a note of the conversation): ‘I like the fact that as Chancellor I can work 16 to 18 hours a day on this job, fully focused. Whereas being PM involves a lot of ceremonial stuff.’

This aversion to ‘ceremonial stuff’ also explains why he has delegated so much to Lord Cameron, in terms of meeting and greeting foreign heads of state — and why, until he reluctantly agreed, at the last moment, Sunak said he did not want to attend the opening of the United Nations COP27 climate change conference in Egypt, the month after he became PM.

But being the public face of the nation on the global stage is an essential part of the job of Prime Minister. It may just be performance — and this clearly doesn’t appeal to Sunak — but it is through such theatrics that the most vital images are transmitted to the wider public.

It is not enough, unfortunately, for a PM to be dedicated to the welfare of military veterans: he also has to get that message across. You might say it is his first duty as a politician, as opposed to that of an administrator.

I know Rishi Sunak is a patriot; he gets completely exasperated at what he sees as people ‘talking Britain down’. Frankly, if he did not have a deep sense of public service to this country, he would have stayed in the world of high finance, rather than fight to become a Member of Parliament (in rural Yorkshire).

And Sunak supported Brexit when it was thought most unlikely we would vote Leave, and the then PM David Cameron had made it clear to backbenchers (as Sunak then was) that they could say goodbye to future preferment if they backed ‘the wrong side’.

Yet among a certain sort of Conservative now being wooed by Farage, there has always been the view that Sunak is ‘not British’. It emerged in an LBC Radio phone-in show in 2022, when Sunak was putting himself forward to succeed Liz Truss.

A man called Jerry, from Lowestoft, who claimed to be a Conservative Party member, said: ‘Rishi is not even British … He doesn’t love England.’

Pressed on the point that Sunak was born and educated in this country, Jerry demurred: ‘Having a British passport doesn’t mean you are a true British patriot… Eighty-five per cent of the British people are White English people, and they want a Prime Minister that reflects them.’

Sunak’s decision to leave Normandy prematurely last week is something he bitterly regrets and has apologised for. But Farage’s attack on his alleged lack of ‘patriotism’ and care for ‘our culture’ is not just ‘deeply regrettable’ (as the Work and Pensions Secretary Mel Stride said yesterday). It is vile.