I deeply regret to inform you that Rishi Sunak is actually a real Saints fan
I deeply regret to inform you that Rishi Sunak is actually a real Saints fan
There was a chance encounter. It was a shock for me too.
It’s been a good week for Saints. The men’s hard won point against Arsenal, the women are up to third in the Championship, and The Lyanco Show™ is giving us somebody to love again. Points are still low but there’s good characters around the club right now, and that matters. Even Nathan Tella and Harrison Reed can’t stop bagging!
Strangely, this has me on tenterhooks, because at any minute now, new Prime Minister Rishi Sunak might use our fair weather to try and ingratiate himself with the public by milking his alleged love of Southampton Football Club. I could deal with this, through ridicule, I could get by. Except, excruciatingly, I know for a fact that it’s true. Rishi Sunak’s red and white.
Probably not hard to guess my politics but surely lot of fans of different persuasions are put out by politicians making political hay out of football. All whilst Bury Town folds, European Super League plans are paraded in public and Newcastle is converted into a vehicle of Saudi soft power. There are actual, non-tokenistic ways that politicians could engage more with football but they limit themselves to cringeworthy one-liners in scripted speeches and interviews, and sad, awful photo-tweets of themselves watching headline games. If I have to see one more photo of a single, suited man, smiling pleasantly while nursing a bottle of Corona in front of a TV set in a vacant Parliamentary meeting room I may actually go full Lyanco-Nketiah.
I’ll get to how I know Sunak is a scummer but first some context. Rishi has touted his love of Saints on several occasions. Earliest and most incredibly, Rishi listed Southampton Football Club is as one of his interests on his Stanford University alumnus page, alongside Star Wars and the “History of Coca-Cola”. A insane combination, but it was hardly likely to be “Mags, bags and slags” from young Rishi.
In 2019, speaking to the BBC about his identity, Sunak said, “In terms of cultural upbringing, I'd be at the temple at the weekend — I'm a Hindu — but I'd also be at the Saints game as well on a Saturday. You do everything, you do both.” This lit the fire for every subsequent profile on the up-and-comer to make a point of his Saints credentials. He has not tweeted about Saints ever, as far as I can tell,1 save for the instance above.
During his leadership campaign this year, things picked up. In August, when asked what he would be if not a politician, Sunak said “If I could run Southampton Football Club, I'd be a very happy man.”. In the same month, when asked how he’d turn our fortunes, he replied “I'm going to be unpopular for saying it here, starting by beating [Manchester] United this weekend.”. That weekend we were in fact playing Leicester, United were scheduled the weekend after.
As he predicted, Rishi turned out to be really unpopular for this, the United-mad Tory membership passing him over for Liz “Mortgage Hunter” Truss. Since his return to the frontbench, he’s been back at his old tricks, engaging in a tiresome exchange of House of Commons banter with Alan Whitehead (Labour MP for Southampton Test) at his first PMQs. Excruciatingly, Penny Mordaunt allegedly mouthed “Play up Pompey” in response. Needless to say this is a disaster for me. I would rather gouge my eyes out with a pipe wrench than listen to these two people engage in playful South Coast club banter with the whole country as witness. I wish I could relay to you that this was the first and only time Rishi Sunak has flaunted his love of Southampton Football Club about Parliament. But it’s not.
Between 2014 and 2017, my girlfriend worked for the Labour Party in their Parliamentary Research Service. People who work on the Parliamentary estate have access to a gym there, and one day in 2016 she was running, when in the wall mirrors that face the treadmills, she saw a man approaching.
The man, genuinely giddy, exclaimed (something along the lines of) “Oh my gosh, you’re a Southampton fan, I can’t believe I’ve found one!”. She was wearing a Saints shirt. He asked her what she did, and she replied that worked for Labour’s PRS. She recounts: meanwhile, “I’m thinking who are you, and I wanna get on with my run.”. When asked the same, he described himself as the “Tory equivalent”, a white lie, he had recently been elected as an MP.
They spoke for a time about football and Saints. He talked about how much he loved going to games with his wife and kids, and suggested that she, him and Conor Burns (Conservative MP for Bournemouth West) should go watch a game together in Parliament’s Sports and Social Bar (they have that too). My girlfriend describes him as very nice and very enthusiastic, and claims his enthusiasm for Saints was genuine. He was clearly ecstatic about having found a Saints fan, in colours, in Parliament, sufficiently so that being engaged by a strange man in the gym was not creepy on this occasion. The next day, Sunak gave her a big wave across Portcullis House.
Before she told me this story, I had my doubts about Rishi’s credentials. Knowing only that he was “from Southampton” but went to Winchester College, I naturally assumed that he was a public schoolboy in need of some political street cred and his scum licence was a forgery. This has precedent. In 2015, David Cameron famously “forgot” he supported Aston Villa when he made a joke about supporting West Ham in a prepared speech. At the very least, Sunak’s support of the club seemed like a tenuous way of connecting himself to a city in which he had truthfully spent little of his time. In a profile in Tatler (a kind of Beano for aristocrats), bizarrely, that I found this too was entirely untrue.
Rishi’s parents are Punjabi Hindus who emigrated from East Africa to Southampton in the 1960s. His father became a GP while his mother ran a pharmacy on the roundabout where Hill Lane meets Burgess Road, at the North-West corner of the Common. It’s not called “Sunak Pharmacy” anymore but it’s still open, and if you’re from that side of the Itchen you’ll probably recognise it. He went to prep school (Stroud, near Romsey, my ends, trust me it’s a weird school) until he was (presumably) thirteen, when his application to Winchester College was accepted but he missed out on a scholarship. Determined, his parents made sacrifices to pay his way through one of Britain’s most famous schools. His brother later went too.
From there, his path is a traditional one: Winchester, Oxford, a big bank, Parliament, running the country. I can’t say how much time he spent in the city as a teenager, or how much he engaged with Saints. On the one hand he boarded in Winchester, on the other, his parent’s surgery was a 10-15 minute walk from The Dell. But amazingly, one thing that is known about his young adult life is that aged 18, he waited tables at Kuti’s Brasserie. Kuti himself is a long-time friend of the family. “I saw him grow up,” Kuti says, “His father used to bring him in his carry cot.”.
This really gets me. I cannot count the number of people who told me growing up that they knew someone “who knows Kuti”. Bullshit, I often called, but a lot of my (Romsey) school friends were from mixed White and South Asian communities in Shirley and Lordshill, near Sunak’s Pharmacy. It isn’t unreasonable to think that my school friends, the Sunaks and Kuti all ran in close-ish circles. This suggests Guy James wasn’t bullshitting me, and nor is Rishi. In any case, when I was growing up Kuti’s Brasserie was almost half as much of a local institution as Saints are, Kuti himself an urban legend blown up like a crime boss. For Kuti to have known him as an infant — Sunak couldn’t have a bigger Southampton endorsement if he was captain of the Titanic.
In light of this, it's difficult to conclude Sunak isn’t a committed and long-standing Saints fan, with a meaningful attachment to the city. Perhaps the first real football fan in No. 10 in 25 years (John Major, Chelsea), and one of only five since 1945 (Attlee, Wilson, Heath, Major, Sunak). But then, why does he come off so plastic? I don’t suppose he gets down to St. Mary’s much nowadays, but he should be able to speak the language. Why do his engagements feel so forced?
This is the strangest thing of all, that often the actual football fans in politics are the worst at using it to their advantage. Keir Starmer, by all accounts a genuinely dedicated Arsenal season-ticket holder and five-a-side player, is just as bad. Starmer’s tweets about football are placid, congratulatory gestures doled out to every team and player. Neither he or Sunak seem to recognise that authentic fanhood is impulsive, partisan and more than a little bit petty. He would be so much more convincing as an Arsenal if just once, he’d dig out Granit Xhaka for being a liability or send David Lammy (MP for Tottenham and a close ally) a sarky remark on St. Totteringham’s Day.
This is why ironically, Boris, a Etonian rugby toff without a footballing bone in his body has had much more success using the game to relate to the public. Boris’ primary political skill is tapping into people's associations and making them feel gooey about them. That he has the ball knowledge of Mark Corrigan doesn’t really matter, because when England “you know, kick it up the other end and just put one right in their fucking goal hole”, he consistently finds a good way to say “fuck yeah!”.
Some people have this skill and some don’t. It’s why we all swooned for Lyanco last weekend and it’s why Villa fans were vitriolic towards Gerrard at his end. It is objectively bad play to invite a red card with a deliberate headbutt in the dying minutes while defending a point, and by contrast Steven Gerrard’s professionalism is beyond reproach. But if you don’t make the fans feel you, they’ll never love you back.
Perhaps this is the saving grace of Sunak being a scummer. As long as he continues to express his love of Saints like he’s Mark Zuckerberg trying to get Itchen North to join him in the Metaverse, his connection will always appear phony and the public will never know the truth.
He has not tweeted anything containing the terms “southampton”, “saints” or “fc”. A couple of tweets include “football” but nothing related to his own fanhood.
Love this Charlie! Who knew!!
Ugh. I, like you, had been consoling myself by thinking he was pretending to like saints as some kind of sportswashig activity. Truth hurts.