As Rishi Sunak might be reflecting this morning, there is no profession more brutal than politics. In what other line of work are you forced to reapply for your job every five years – and take to the streets to beg for the right to keep it?

The humiliation is greater still for a prime minister who loses an election. The trappings of power will evaporate the moment Sunak departs the Palace after his audience with the King: the car, the flat above the shop, the officials who were on hand 24 hours a day – all gone. Some former PMs have even been reduced to begging friends for accommodation after their hurried departure from Downing Street.

As our wealthiest ever Prime Minister, Sunak need not worry about where he is going to live, but the fall will be all the greater given that he lost a seemingly impregnable 80-seat majority won by Boris Johnson in 2019. Sunak looks like the man who drove a perfectly functioning vehicle off the road and sank into a swamp.

But that is hardly fair. At any other time, he could have been a popular PM. But he was dealt a more dreadful hand than any predecessor in modern times.

It is a cliché to say that a departing PM will be treated more kindly by history than they were by voters. I remember the same being said about John Major and I don’t think it has turned out to be true in his case. He remains the petulant figure who reduced
his party to open warfare by treating with contempt the rebels who correctly foresaw that the Maastricht Treaty would lead to a great centralisation of EU powers.

In the coming years, however, will we still think that Sunak was the worst PM we have ever had? He frequently showed he had the right skills and ability – it is just that the Conservatives were already doomed by the time he took office and there was nothing that he could have done to win this election.

The point of no return came in September 2022 when the Bank of England was forced to prop up bond markets in the wake of Kwasi Kwarteng’s mini-budget. By then, the Tories were already trailing in polls, largely thanks to Partygate.

But the situation was still recoverable, just as it had been for other governments caught in mid-term crises. The bond market collapse, however, was one of those turning points – like Black Wednesday in 1992 – when the voting public made up its mind that the Government had been in power too long.

Sunak has in effect been punished for something he had repeatedly warned about: Liz Truss’ over-hasty desire to cut taxes and push up borrowing in order to do so. But Truss, too, was dealt a bad hand. Two large black clouds have hung over the Conservative election campaign: the Covid pandemic and Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Few governments have survived the fallout from Covid.

The surge in inflation – the result of central banks printing money to boost demand in an economy where supply of goods and services is seriously constrained – was already under way when Russian tanks crossed into Ukraine. We would have had a cost-of-living crisis, whoever was in power. Labour know this, of course, but have chosen to ignore it in order
to try to blame everything on Tory “mismanagement”.

Yet Sunak did not mismanage the economy. On the contrary, he did much to save it from greater turmoil. It is thanks to him that Britain avoided a disastrous fourth lockdown at Christmas 2021. Ignoring evidence from South Africa that the Omicron variant was much milder than previous ones, government advisers wanted to confine us in our homes once more. So did Keir Starmer.

Yet Sunak, citing other data, argued in Cabinet that it was not necessary. He was right – and we were spared what would have been a further devastating blow to the economy and the NHS.

Moreover, there are around nine million people in Britain who have Sunak to thank for retaining their jobs during the pandemic thanks to the unprecedented furlough scheme.

Sunak’s policy of reducing, and one day abolishing, national insurance to eliminate the “jobs tax” should have been Labour policy. It was his Conservatives who could claim to have become the real party of the workers.

But few people were listening by then. The bulk of voters had made up their minds that the Tories had to go.

That is their right, of course, in a democracy. But in years to come, I suspect many will have a niggling question in their minds: were we really right to dump a decent and able man from office so unceremoniously?