For all his grace, Sunak – who received 42 per cent of the final vote to Truss’ 57 – must know what we all knew at the start of the Conservative leadership contest. For the winner, the highest office in the land. for the vanquished, not a silver medal, but a millstone—the curse, perhaps for life, of being considered “almost a man.” It’s injury added to insult. Sunak, like Truss, has come under relentless scrutiny and criticism in recent weeks. Even the pistol duel at dawn, banned nearly 200 years ago, seems somehow more humane than a Tory leadership election. Sunak’s life, as far as we know, has been successfully gilded so far. He went from Winchester College to Oxford, from Oxford to Stanford as a Fulbright Scholar, and from there to a lucrative career in finance. He and his wife, Akshata Murty, have a combined fortune of £730 million. Sunak was elected to the House of Commons in 2015 and was chancellor, staggeringly, just five years later. During the pandemic, he was the most popular politician in the government. But in one way or another, failure hits us all. Every human mind harbors an overlapping multitude of tightly or loosely conceived dreams and aspirations. We cannot realize them all, especially those that require us to compete against opponents with equal vigor. What now for Sunak? What can save him from defeat? And what about the rest? If there are lessons to be learned from losing a leadership election, perhaps we can soak them in without having to thwart our own ambitions before the nation. Jacqueline Hurst is a certified life coach who has worked with more than 7,000 clients, many of them high achievers who may have little in common with Sunak. Hurst, author of How to Do You, questions whether Sunak should consider his election loss a failure. Failure, he says, does not exist. “Look at Serena Williams. He hasn’t gotten to where he’s gotten by winning every match – he’s had to lose some matches to get there. “So I don’t really believe in that big word, failure – ‘Oh my God, it’s failure.’ There is no such thing as failure. Because every time things don’t go according to plan, there’s a bigger reason behind it. And there is always something better that comes from it. There is always growth from this space.” One does not have to believe that everything happens for a reason, as the saying goes, to accept that there are different productive ways of looking at failure. “Either you look at your life,” Hurst says, “and you go, ‘Oh my God, I failed here and I failed there,’ and you sit in a negative mindset, or you can use it to lift yourself up, to become a smarter person . And that’s a choice you make.” If Sunak was sitting in front of her, then, Hearst would tell him the following: “First of all, well done for getting into something so huge. And secondly, not getting it might not be a bad thing.” Sunak has almost no options. He could stay in politics, ready for another tilt at the leadership if Liz Truss’s government is voted out in 2024 after two bruising years of struggling with existing crises (cost of living, energy, housing, Ukraine, etc.) and crises i get up In that case, Sunak could see this year’s leadership election as a hospital pass he was lucky not to receive. He could leave politics altogether, perhaps to take up a lucrative consulting role either at a bank or, like Nick Clegg, at a major tech company. Sunak, having received one of David Cameron’s texts on behalf of the now bankrupt financial firm Greensill Capital, may not choose to follow the former prime minister into the lobby. But it might also note the many post-colonial lives of George Osborne, who had nine jobs at the time of writing – university lecturer, newspaper editor, banking adviser, chairman of the British Museum, craftsman, tailor, soldier, rather vicious commentator on Theresa May – since leaving government in 2016. Other interesting post-ministerial careers include Tristram Hunt’s directorship of the V&A, David Miliband’s chairmanship of the International Rescue Committee, Tony Blair’s spectacular career in mental gymnastics and the immortal Ed Balls contribution to Strictly Come Dancing. “There’s a million things he could do,” Hurst says of Sunak. Liz Truss is beaming shortly after becoming Britain’s new Prime Minister (Getty) For now, Hurst says, Sunak has to ask himself this. “What are the lessons I learned here? Are there things I should have learned?’ And I’m sure there will be, because we always learn from these experiences. “And what do I do with this new learning? Where should I go forward?’ “Let’s say he ends up in the next role he does, and he really likes that role. He’ll look back and say, “Thank God something else didn’t happen.” Of these realizations – and one wonders if the torturous life of a goldfish prime minister is far worse than Sunak’s more profitable and pro-social alternatives – Hurst says: “You might not see it right away. But you will see in time – time is very good for such things.” To those who believe they have failed, Hurst advocates a change in mindset. However, they do not happen immediately. they require hard work. It is not enough to agree with the idea that failures are part of success. the idea must be absorbed both emotionally and intellectually. “They don’t teach us this stuff in school, and I wish we did,” says Hurst. “The first step, and I don’t mean to sound la-la, is awareness and consciousness of what you’re really thinking. We don’t know what we are thinking most of the time when we are wandering around unconscious and unconscious. So the first step is to ask yourself, “What am I thinking? And that might take some time.” The second step, he says, “is to say to yourself, ‘I have a choice. If I think negative, that will make me feel negative.’ Your mind is the most powerful muscle in your entire body when you learn to use it properly and ask yourself these questions. “How do I want to think about this?” It’s one of my favorite questions.” Hurst doesn’t want to speculate on Sunak’s personality or level of resilience, but she believes he would benefit, like anyone, from the support of his family and friends. He can look to classic examples of people who have turned failure into success. like Williams, Hurst mentions Walt Disney, Oprah Winfrey and the Wright brothers. Losing, he says, teaches us more than winning. What Rishi Sunak may or may not do for the foreseeable future (AFP/Getty) Hurst has its own recovery story. after a difficult childhood, he became a drug addict. It was only when he was saved from addiction that he decided to become a life coach. “That’s definitely something I don’t consider a failure,” she says of that period of her life. “I’m 19 years clean last week, and getting clean, all of that, is a huge part of who I’ve become.” From her clients, Hurst hears a myriad of stories of what one might call either failures or, more constructively, failures. Lost bids. Lovers going out. Businesses don’t go away. Hirst imagines someone whose cafe was closed during the pandemic. “It was blood, sweat and tears all day, and they said, ‘Well, this isn’t working.’ This is it. And they’ve gone back to wherever, maybe Italy, and now they’re with their family, and they’ve met a nice man and they’re having a baby. And that wouldn’t be happening if he was still here. So that’s what I’m saying: there’s always a bigger picture.” It is not true that things always turn out for the better. We benefit from the success of the scientists who created the mRNA vaccines. we will shudder this winter as a consequence of failing to build more nuclear power stations. But success and failure are usually much less clear. The human mind, so powerfully disposed to narrative, is quicker than we think to find meaning in endeavors we did not imagine ourselves pursuing. The voluptuous corridor turns faster than we imagine. Rishi Sunak won’t be prime minister, but he might end up happier for it.
