Britain’s outgoing Prime Minister Risihi Sunak, and his wife Akshata Murty, walk to a car as they leave after he delivered a statement after losing the general election, outside 10 Downing Street in London on July 5, 2024.
| Photo Credit: AFP

Britain outgoing Prime Minister Rishi Sunak on July 5 apologised to the public after his Conservatives were trounced by Labour in the UK general election, and said he would step down as party leader.

The 44-year-old former financier gambled on going to the country six months before he had to, hoping that better economic data would swing public support back towards the Tories.

But Thursday’s vote indicated that Britons wanted to send a clear message to the party by kicking them out of power after 14 years of economic hardships, Brexit upheaval and Tory infighting.

“To the country, I would like to say first and foremost, I am sorry,” he said outside the Prime Minister’s residence at Downing Street, before heading to Buckingham Palace to tender his resignation as prime minister to King Charles III.

“I have given this job my all, but you have sent a clear signal that the government of the United Kingdom must change. And yours is the only judgement that matters.”

“I have heard your anger, your disappointment, and I take responsibility for this loss.”

The scale of the defeat made it inevitable that Mr. Sunak — the conservative party’s fifth leader since 2010 — would have to step down as Tory head as well.

But he said that he would stay on in the role until the arrangements were made for an internal leadership contest, which is expected to be a fight for the ideological soul of the party.

Mr. Sunak saw a record number of his top ministerial team lose their seats, including defence secretary Grant Shapps and House of Commons leader Penny Mordaunt.

His immediate predecessor as prime minister, Liz Truss, also lost her seat.

Mr. Sunak — an observant Hindu who is Britain’s first prime minister of colour — wished his successor Keir Starmer well, calling him “a decent, public-spirited man who I respect”.

“One of the most remarkable things about Britain is just how unremarkable it is that two generations after my grandparents came here with little, I could become prime minister,” he added.

“And that I could watch my two young daughters light Diwali candles on the steps in Downing Street. We must hold true to that idea of who we are.”

London:

Britain’s Labour Party won mayoral polls in London and central England on Saturday, in crushing defeats for Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s unpopular Conservatives ahead of a national election due later this year.

While Labour politician Sadiq Khan’s re-election as London mayor was widely expected, Labour also snatched a surprise, narrow victory in the central West Midlands region that is home to Britain’s second-largest city of Birmingham.

The wins are Labour’s latest in local elections to councils and mayoralties on Thursday and could fuel fresh calls for Sunak to step down.

Opinion polls predicted that Labour would win the next national election, propelling Keir Starmer to power and ending 14 years of Conservative government in Britain. Sunak has said he intends to call a vote in the second half of the year.

Conservative West Midlands Mayor Andy Street lost to his Labour opponent Richard Parker. Street’s 37.5% of the vote was eclipsed by 37.8% for Parker, a razor-thin margin translating to 1,508 votes.

Street, who has served as mayor since 2017, ran a campaign emphasising his personal record on investment while downplaying his Conservative affiliation. He publicly disputed Sunak’s decision to scrap the high-speed HS2 rail link from Birmingham to Manchester last year.

Parker had sought to link him to the unpopular national government. “I believe a Labour mayor working with a Labour government will help get Britain’s future back,” Parker said in a speech following the result.

Starmer said the result was beyond Labour’s expectations. “People across the country have had enough of Conservative chaos and decline and voted for change with Labour,” he said in a statement.

Sunak had been counting on getting an electoral boost from recent announcements on defence spending and the progress of his divisive plan to send asylum seekers to Rwanda.

Khan’s victory in London, his third in a row, came despite some public anger over knife crime and the Ultra Low Emission Zone that charges drivers of older, more polluting vehicles a daily fee.

“It’s been a difficult few months, we faced a campaign of non-stop negativity,” Khan said in a speech after the results showed he had won 43.8% of the vote against 33% for the Conservatives’ candidate, Susan Hall.

“For the last eight years, London has been swimming against the tide of a Tory (Conservative) government and now with a Labour Party that’s ready to govern again under Keir Starmer, it’s time for Rishi Sunak to give the public a choice.”

Khan, 53, became the first Muslim mayor of the British capital in 2016.

Hall had made scrapping ULEZ a centrepiece of her campaign but the 69-year-old Donald Trump fan made a series of gaffes and faced accusations of racism after being found to have engaged with far-right content online.

In one bright spot for Conservatives, Ben Houchen won re-election as mayor of Tees Valley in northern England on Friday.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Silicon Valley:

Since his tumultuous takeover of Twitter, Elon Musk has made an unabashed turn to the right politically, defying the orthodoxy that Silicon Valley is a citadel of well-heeled liberals beholden to Democrats.

Long considered non-identifiable ideologically, Musk’s politics are now hardline right wing as he uses his platform (now called X) to stoke the themes cherished by Fox News, conservative talk radio and far right movements across the West.

In just the latest example, repeating a conspiracy theory of far right chat rooms, Musk last week posted that US President Joe Biden was importing migrants for votes, laying the groundwork for “something far worse than 9/11.”

But beyond the posts, the question on everyone’s mind is whether the world’s second richest person will put his weight, and wealth, behind the bid of former US president Donald Trump to retake the White House.

The rumor mill went into overdrive when The New York Times reported that the two men met, along with other Republican donors, in Florida last week.

Trump is seriously trailing Biden in raising campaign funds, even if he sailed toward the Republican nomination to be US president, and Musk could single handedly make up the shortfall.

Musk turned to X to insist that “to be super clear, I am not donating money to either candidate for US President.”

But the funding of US elections is opaque and complicated, and Biden backers worry that Musk could change his mind or fund political committees that themselves finance Trump, or find other ways to help the Republican cause.

‘Techno-optimist’

Musk is not alone: other Silicon Valley mavens are also defending conservative causes, making noise in what electorally remains a liberal stronghold; in 2020, Trump’s vote share in Silicon Valley was less than 25 percent.

Some tycoons are seeking to build a political movement that, even if not directly supporting Trump, embraces conservative causes, cryptocurrencies, and goes against the California grain.

One of the loudest voices in this shift is Marc Andreessen, the early internet tycoon who founded Netscape and now co-runs Andreessen Horowitz, a venerable venture capital company.

Once a typically left-of-center tech magnate, who had close ties to former vice president Al Gore, Andreessen now fights vehemently against left-wing priorities, especially so-called “woke” considerations about equality or workplace inclusiveness.

Last year, in a 5,200-word “techno-optimist manifesto,” Andreessen laid out a techno-utopian vision for the future that listed co-opted government, regulation and worries about discrimination or equality as enemies.

Like many of his fellow right-wing investors, Andreessen’s company is heavily invested in cryptocurrencies and last year launched a political war chest to make trouble for lawmakers, Democratic or Republican, who want the nascent industry more heavily controlled.

For tech analyst Carolina Milanesi, the newly emerging outspokenness could be less about aping Musk than worry from an old guard that the status quo is vanishing.

“As people are talking about wokeness, when you’re talking about either diversity, equality and inclusion, or you’re talking about sustainability, all of those things, basically are a threat to the status quo,” she said.

This exasperation with what Musk calls the “woke mind virus” is what drives a hit podcast called “All-In,” where four tech bigwigs, some friends with Musk, opine about the world and the latest tech developments.

The hosts include David Sacks, one of the members of the PayPal mafia, a group of men that includes Musk, who worked at that late 1990s startup and since became the representatives of Silicon Valley’s small but growing right-leaning faction.

Another PayPal veteran is investor Peter Thiel, a German-born arch conservative who associated himself with Trump when he entered the White House.

After the assault of the US Capitol in 2021, Thiel said he would stay out of politics and has since become a sort of philosopher king of Silicon Valley’s right-wing who remains above the fray.

‘Far left’ AI

The power of this new guard is beginning to be felt with the diversity minded tech companies on the back foot over criticisms that San Francisco is ridden with drugs and crime or that generative AI has become too “woke.”

Google CEO Sundar Pichai last month found himself under fire, and his company’s share price bruised, after it emerged that its just launched Gemini AI app had generated images of ethnically diverse World War II Nazi troops and other ahistorical gaffes.

“The people running Google AI are smuggling in their preferences and their biases, and those biases are extremely liberal,” said Sacks in an All-In podcast segment titled “Google’s woke AI disaster.”

In a sign of rising conservative influence, Google’s Pichai called the AI snafu “completely unacceptable” and founder Sergey Brin said “we definitely messed up” in generating such “far left” imagery.

 

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)