Sunak’s summer of love with British voters faces reckoning

In coming months, Rishi Sunak will start scaling back policies that saw the U.K. government pay part of workers’ wages for the first time and guarantee loans to businesses.

LONDON: Rishi Sunak will on Monday stop picking up part of the tab for millions of Britons’ dinners. It marks a turning point for a chancellor whose ambitious spending in the early days of the Covid pandemic turned him into the most popular of Boris Johnson’s cabinet colleagues.

In coming months, he will start scaling back policies that saw the U.K. government pay part of workers’ wages for the first time and guarantee loans to businesses. For a Conservative like Sunak, such spending is, in his words,"not sustainable” with the national debt surpassing 2 trillion pounds ($2.7 trillion) for the first time in history.