Sunak warns Starmer desires to decrease voting age to ‘entrench his energy’

Rishi Sunak‘s dislike of Labour‘s plan to slap VAT on private-school fees is not just political – it’s deeply personal.

The Prime Minister famously attended Winchester College, the ancient public school in Hampshire which has produced leading figures in society for centuries.

Less famously, his parents had to scrimp and save for years to send him there. Mr Sunak and his wife regularly grace the pages of the Sunday Times Rich List these days. His parents – first-generation immigrants to this country – very much did not.

His father worked all hours as a GP, his mother ran a modest pharmacy in Southampton, where the three Sunak children were also expected to help out.

Scholarships helped, but every spare penny was put towards ensuring the children had the best possible education.

‘It was a big stretch,’ Mr Sunak says of his middle-class upbringing. ‘People like my parents are the people who will be most affected by Labour’s change. 

‘People who are working hard, who are aspiring to provide a better life for their kids. They are the people that will lose out.

‘I believe in an aspirational country, I believe if you’re working hard and you want to provide a better life for your family, then any government I lead will be on your side. 

‘Whether you want to send your kids to a private school, if you want to buy your first home as a young couple. Whether you want to set up a small business on your own or set up in self-employment, which I think is something to be admired.

‘Those are all things that speak to the type of country that we are in that I want to support.’

He readily acknowledges that his belief in the power of education to ‘transform people’s lives for the better’ is ‘a reflection on my upbringing’.

Friends say that when Mr Sunak got his first big job at investment bank Goldman Sachs, he sent his parents his first pay cheque as a thank you. They never cashed it.

Even while studying at Oxford University, he would trek home at weekends to help out in the family business.

‘I worked for my mum in that shop for most of my childhood, in the back and in the front,’ he says. ‘We all went on Sundays to clean the shop. I worked there the rest of the week – I did the books in the evenings and the weekends.

‘I mean, I came home from university a lot – pretty much every weekend, I was working at home in the shop.’

If hard work was enough, he would be looking forward with confidence to another term as Prime Minister. But we meet on a train to Doncaster almost four weeks into a six-week election campaign, which, if the polls are to be believed, is not going well for the Conservatives.

In time-honoured fashion, Mr Sunak insists the ‘only poll that matters’ is the one on July 4.

But he acknowledges that if the current doom-laden polls suggesting the Tories will be reduced to fewer than 100 seats are replicated in the election, ‘it would mean handing Labour a completely blank cheque to raise taxes on everything – on your car, your home, your work, your pension – and I don’t want that to happen.

‘That’s why I’m going to fight very hard over the second half of this campaign to make sure everyone understands the real risk for their financial security that a future Labour government poses.’

Boris Johnson was right, he says, to warn in this paper at the weekend that so-called Starmergeddon would mean a ‘sharp Left turn’ for the country.

Mr Sunak’s recent schedule has been exhausting, with attendance at the G7 summit in Italy, a Ukraine summit in Switzerland and Trooping the Colour all coming on top of election duties in the past few days. Is it true he has been getting by on five hours’ sleep a night?

‘It’s been a bit less than that the last few days, with all the travel,’ he says, before insisting he feels ‘energised’ by the chance to put his case to the country.

Whoever wins the election next month will have to head almost immediately to Washington for a summit to mark the 75th anniversary of Nato, where the war in Ukraine will dominate.

Mr Sunak believes his decision to raise defence spending to 2.5 per cent of GDP by 2030 will give him the ‘moral authority’ to pressure other Nato countries to do the same, potentially generating an extra £140 billion in Nato spending and ‘sending a very strong signal to our adversaries, starting with (Vladimir) Putin, that we’re not going anywhere, that he’s not going to outlast us in Ukraine… sending a powerful message of deterrence’.

He warns that Sir Keir Starmer’s failure to match that spending timetable will send a ‘dangerous’ signal to Putin and leave the Labour leader with ‘no authority to tell allies to spend more’.

‘He and the Labour Party are not prioritising our country’s security at a time that is undeniably the most dangerous and uncertain that our country has been in in decades. It deeply concerns me.’

He brushes aside Sir Keir’s argument that a ‘changed Labour Party’ has abandoned the peacenik stance of the Jeremy Corbyn years, pointing out that both Labour’s deputy leader Angela Rayner and foreign spokesman David Lammy voted against the renewal of the Trident nuclear deterrent just a few years ago.

‘Those are two of the four most powerful people in a future Labour government,’ he says. 

‘Two of them don’t believe in that ultimate guarantor of our security. I’ve done this job for a year and a half. I can tell you how important that is.’ 

Nigel Farage also gets short shrift for his call last week for Ukraine to enter peace talks with the ‘very clever’ Putin, even if that means ceding some territory.

‘History shows that trying to appease dictators and bullies never succeeds,’ Mr Sunak says. ‘I think everyone should look at the lessons from history.’

The PM is not keen on discussing the Reform party leader in detail, but is quick to point out that Mr Farage’s own deputy said last week that getting even two or three MPs would be a ‘fantastic result’. ‘That tells you what you need to know about the real choice at the election,’ he says.

‘All I’d say to people who I know are frustrated – and of course I accept and understand that – I’d ask them just to think about the things that they care about and who’s more likely to deliver them. And the fact is that that’s me. I’ve got a clear plan to stop the boats… the flights will go to Rwanda if I’m elected.

‘We’re already bringing down the levels of legal migration. The number of visas issued this year is down by 30 per cent. The levels of net migration are forecast to halve over the next year and we will have a legal cap for the first time. 

‘So it will guarantee to continue falling. If you want a more proportionate approach to net zero that prioritises our country’s energy security and doesn’t saddle families with bills. That’s the path I’ve set out – Keir Starmer would reverse all those changes.’

Sir Keir recently branded Mr Sunak a ‘liar’ over claims – backed up largely by Treasury research – that Labour’s plans will require an extra £2,000 per person in taxes over and above what the party has acknowledged.

For his part, the PM says Sir Keir is ‘not being straight’ about his real agenda – whether it’s on tax, immigration or Brexit.

He acknowledges that voters are ‘angry and frustrated’ with him, but urges them to think twice before ‘punishing’ him for the difficulties of the past few years. 

‘This election is about the future,’ he says. ‘And of course, people can look at my record and that will inform their judgment. No government gets everything perfectly right, I haven’t got everything perfectly right – of course not.

‘But we are undeniably making progress on bringing immigration down, on stopping the boats and cutting people’s taxes and protecting pensions and getting to net zero and in a more sensible way, investing more in our country’s security, and all those big areas. We are now on the path to a more secure future.’ 

Labour, he says, would ‘just take us backwards’.

In the end, it may not be enough. But the man who once returned home from university every weekend to help out in his mum’s shop, can be relied upon to keep saying it at each and every opportunity until the last vote has been cast.