Rishi Sunak has committed to staying on as an MP for the full five-year term if the Conservative party loses the general election. Speaking to journalists in Puglia, Italy, where he is attending the G7 summit, the prime minister said he intended to serve a full parliamentary term regardless of the overall result on 4 July. Asked whether he would stay in the Commons for the next five years as prime minister if the Tory party won, or as an opposition MP if it lost, Sunak said: “Yes and yes.” The Conservatives are languishing 20 points behind Labour in opinion polls and are widely expected to lose the election in less than three weeks’ time.
Despite his repeated and frustrated denials, there has been speculation in Westminster that Sunak will leave politics if the Conservatives lose, and move with his family to California. He met his wife, Akshata Murty, at Stanford University and the couple still own an apartment in Santa Monica. Last month, Sunak said the claims were “simply not true”, after Zac Goldsmith, a Tory peer and ally of Boris Johnson, claimed he would “disappear off to California” if he lost. In a fresh blow to the Tory campaign, a YouGov poll on Thursday night put the Tories in third place for the first time behind Nigel Farage’s party, Reform UK. Sunak said Labour would be handed a “blank cheque” if that poll were replicated at the election. He insisted he would not change his campaigning style and was still “fighting very hard for every vote”.
“We’re only halfway through this election, right?” he said. “I always say the poll that matters is the one on 4 July – but if that poll was replicated on 4 July, it would be handing Labour a blank cheque to tax everyone – tax their home, their pension, their car, their family – and I’ll be fighting very hard to make sure that doesn’t happen.” YouGov’s poll put Labour on 37%, Reform UK on 19% and the Conservatives on 18%, though the pollster said the one-point gap was within the margin of error. Farage seized on it and declared that his party was “the opposition now”. Sunak said the choice between the parties would “crystallise for people ahead of polling day”. “Actually, when I’ve been out and about talking to people, they do understand that a vote for anyone who’s not a Conservative candidate is just a vote for Keir Starmer in No 10,” he said. “At the end of the day on 5 July, one of two people’s going to be prime minister – Keir Starmer or me. And this week the most important thing that happened was, you saw both major parties’ manifestos; that’s their programme for government if they were elected.”