Rishi Sunak and Leo Varadkar have a lot in common. Both are of Indian heritage and are sons of doctors. Both went to private school and enjoyed a true bourgeois (neither petite nor haute) upbringing. Both occupy the metropolitan end of Englishness or Irishness – the tailored suit, financial-services-style, rather than the flat-capped, ruddy-faced one. Both are ambitious and are questioned over their ethnic and national identity. (There were plenty of attempts to link the pair as similar economic thinkers back in 2022, though most were unsuccessful).
The ethnic identity of Sunak came up recently, as Fraser Nelson, former editor of the Spectator and political liberal, defended the former British prime minister’s Englishness. He told the Triggernometry podcast: “He is absolutely English – he was born and bred here.” Host Konstantin Kisin, a product of the anti-woke right, mounted a predictable challenge: “He’s a brown Hindu. How is he English?” I couldn’t help but recall Boris Johnson’s quip about Varadkar: “Why isn’t he called Murphy like the rest of them?”
Kisin’s comments saw liberal centrist Britain rush to register its distaste – that any of this was even up for discussion was an aberration. “Am I English, Konstantin?” one Jewish commentator asked. Does Kisin himself, born in Moscow, consider himself English, another wondered.
Of course, all of this is willingly missing Triggernometry’s point: this was not a question aimed at Sunak’s feeling of cultural belonging or civic identity. That is a far murkier line of inquiry, Kisin might suggest. Instead this was straightforward: is Sunak ethnically English? (Whether there even is a coherent English ethnic identity – and who might actually fulfil the presumably protean and myriad criteria – was not really discussed.)
Debates over Rishi Sunak’s Englishness or Leo Varadkar’s Irishness are deranged
Kanye West has taken vice-signalling to a new level of brutishness. Can he come back?
This is a good time to recognise all that Salman Rushdie sacrificed for free speech
I am tired of explaining Michael D Higgins’s words to incredulous English people
It was heartening to see a wholesale refusal to engage with the argument. Kisin attempted to mainstream ethno-racial talking points and it didn’t work, not because it’s too provocative, but because it registers on sane and normal ears as weird and irrelevant.
It was the same when it came to Varadkar. Those hung up on his ethnicity and his surname were confined to the very-right fringes, usually on the internet and without any real grip on the culture at all. (Johnson, rude though he may be, was joking less about Varadkar and more about the Irish).
After the Dublin riots of November 2023 and the violent disorder across England last summer, ethnic tension spilt over into the streets. Long-held grievances, demographic change, listlessness among the working class and, in Ireland specifically, a housing crisis came together in a combustible mix. To ignore the racial aspect of the unrest would be very dishonest: in Ireland one WhatsApp message read “any f**king g**o, foreigner, anyone, just kill them”. .
But all of this was still confined to the margins. And in the State that general sentiment has never found mainstream political expression (arguably not in Britain either, as Reform UK treads just the right side of the line). What we saw with the Triggernometry “Is Sunak really English” affair is not a new political and rhetorical reality, whereby highly racial language is laundered into the public as a normal and reasonable talking point.
Instead, we saw the opposite. This was a miscalculation, a bid to cling on to a cultural moment that doesn’t really exist in Britain or in Ireland. Is Varadkar Irish? Does that mean Celtic? Whatever happened to the White Anglo-Saxon Protestants? Don’t we all sound completely deranged?
By March 2023, Scotland’s first minister, Ireland’s taoiseach and the United Kingdom’s prime minister were all of south Asian descent. It became a cliche at the time to note how well this reflected on multi-ethnic democracies; in particular to point out how all of this came to be with little fanfare or comment.
“It’s a good sign that their election wasn’t the occasion for too much fuss, but was generally accepted as unexceptional,” a Times of London leader column said. I don’t mind banalities like this when they are true: this was proof of a basically liberal and tolerant disposition, and one that does not cohere with the fringe attempts to marshal racial tension into something much nastier.
There has been a conservative swing in the culture – symbolised, but not generated, by Donald Trump’s election. Some of that will leak into the public conversation here and in England. But we know now quite confidently that any of this racial wittering about whose ethnicity is what will continue to make the fringes sound like reactionary weirdos; and that – even in a society that needs to have a louder and more frank conversation about immigration – they will never have any cultural purchase. Call it a quiet victory for tolerance.
In any case, a far more interesting argument is posed by Peter Franklin in UnHerd. He is a dual national like myself (he is half-French and half-English; I am half-Irish, half-English) and suggests that these dimensions, and those of cultural identity and civic nationalism, “make sense of our existence”.
So, what does it mean for a young, half-Indian man to be elevated to taoiseach? Or indeed the son of Pakistani immigrants to come, albeit briefly, to lead the Scottish National Party? This is where we will come to understand ourselves.
