Rishi Sunak pledges to put U.K. on ‘crisis footing’ if elected PM

The former Chancellor said that a business-as-usual approach would not work in the face of the serious economic challenges facing the country

Rishi Sunak has unleashed an intense campaign spree this weekend in his mission to win Conservative Party votes to be elected their leader and on July 23, 2022 pledged to put the U.K. on a “crisis footing” if elected Prime Minister.

The 42-year-old former Chancellor told in an interview that a business-as-usual approach would not work in the face of the serious economic challenges facing the country.

“Having been inside government I think the system just isn’t working as well as it should. And the challenges that I’m talking about, they’re not abstract, they’re not things that are coming long down the track,” he told the newspaper.

“They’re challenges that are staring us in the face and a business-as-usual mentality isn’t going to cut it in dealing with them. So, from day one of being in office I’m going to put us on a crisis footing,” he said.

Ahead of a speech in Grantham, the eastern England hometown of 1980s' Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher — the former Tory leader both Sunak and opponent Liz Truss are pitching as their role model to woo traditional voters — the Southampton-born Indian-origin former banker-turned-politician highlighted how his deeply Conservative values shaped by his family’s pharmacy business.

“I was brought up in a home with kitchen-table conservative values, my mum ran a small business, Margaret Thatcher talked about family budget. All of us care about what we leave our children and our grandchildren. Sound money is the most conservative of conservative values. If we don’t stand for that, I don’t know what the point of the Conservative Party is,” he said.

Besides tackling inflation as a national emergency, Sunak said his focus will also be on delivering better value for money value for money for the taxpayer-funded National Health Service (NHS) — an issue that is personal to him with a grandparent just out of an NHS hospital.