What should Rishi Sunak do next?

The old English nursery rhyme The North Wind Doth Blow asks 'what will poor robin do then, poor thing?' about the impending onset of cold conditions.

As he faces up to the prospect of a heavy defeat in the Tory leadership contest, we are similarly entitled to wonder what will poor Rishi do then, poor thing?

And Rishi Sunak is clearly already thinking about that because he has begun framing the most benign possible interpretation of the causation of his impending defeat, telling the BBC’s Nick Robinson that he would rather lose honestly than win by stoking up unrealistic expectations.

When he was questioned at Thursday night’s Telegraph hustings in Cheltenham on whether he might duck out of the Commons and go back into business, he gave a reply about being honoured to represent the people of Richmond for so long as they would have him. That did not quite amount to the proverbial non-denial denial of an intent to quit, but neither did it seal off the possibility that he might change his mind at some unspecified point in the future.

It is profoundly to be hoped that Sunak does stay in the Common. In a sane world, a very bright 42-year-old who has only been in the Commons for seven years should still be acquiring breadth of experience and travelling towards his political zenith rather than contemplating a final nadir.

What he should certainly not do, or be invited to do, is take a place in Liz Truss’s cabinet next month. For he has taken a big position in contradiction to hers on economic policy and has depicted his own stance in terms of morality and values rather than mere tactics.

He has described her plan to lump another £50 billion or so on the national credit card, to be paid off eventually as he sees it by his children and ours, variously as not moral, not responsible and not Conservative. So to sit in a Truss cabinet that implements its unfunded tax-cutting agenda from September onwards would not only raise questions about his sincerity, but also about his honour.

The real decision facing him therefore is whether it is worth hanging around on the backbenches, attempting to play the younger-elder statesman, mixing support for the Truss administration where he agrees with it with carefully calibrated and non-hysterical warnings about the dangers of running up too much debt.

Or would this actually constitute 'hanging around like a bad smell' and inevitably lead to depictions of him as a Ted Heath figure performing an incredible sulk?

Both David Cameron and George Osborne initially reacted to their departure from high office, post-referendum, by sincerely intending to immerse themselves in the great honour of being good constituency MPs. But pretty soon they tired of this. Cameron found that whatever he said about any major policy area was only newsworthy to the extent that it could be seen to complicate the life of Theresa May and quit the Commons to avoid clashing with her over the idea of new grammar schools.

For his part, Osborne knew he had already rubbed her up the wrong way many times and misinterpreted her initial honeymoon ratings as indicating that a long spell of May hegemony was certain. So out they both bowed, Cameron in September 2016 and Osborne in April 2017 when Mrs May called a snap general election.

Had Osborne instead hung around he could, by now, be in the middle of his second attempt to become prime minister and might even be on course to succeed.

The moral of that story is that while politics remains a long game, it is one that is played increasingly quickly. Cameron was master of all he surveyed when winning an unlikely Commons majority in 2016, but dead in the water just a year later. May was 20 points ahead and cruising towards a landslide election win until suddenly she wasn’t. Boris Johnson won a landslide that suggested he was set fair for a ten-year tenure in Downing Street before he blew up.

So nobody can say how long the Liz Truss premiership will last, let alone whether her economic strategy will work. If it fails for the reasons suggested by Sunak during this leadership campaign then he will have every chance of becoming Leader of the Opposition just two years from now. It is not even quite impossible that jittery Tory MPs will dump her before the next general election given their recent adoption of the Roman Abramovic approach towards team managers.

Both Cameron and Osborne have, with dispiriting inevitability, amassed significant fortunes from their various business ventures since leaving high office. I am quite sure that this is scant consolation to either man, especially given various reputational issues that have arisen along the way.

The Sunak household is already as rich as Croesus – clearly I was using the word 'poor' above to mean being afflicted by bad news rather than not having two pennies to rub together – and one would hope that the idea of fixating on the acquisition of yet more wealth would strike him as about the dullest possible use of his talents.

So he should follow the example of poor robin from the nursery rhyme, who decided to 'sit in a barn and keep himself warm and hide his head under his wing, poor thing'. Sunak should lick his wounds, ride out the blues that customarily engulf politicians after failed campaigns, do some heavy political thinking and wait for the weather to change.