Remarkable, really. Call it the joys of cognitive dissonance. Listen to Rishi Sunak speak for more than a few seconds and you will get the impression you are living in some kind of nirvana. That the UK is a blissed-out superstate. A land of plenty, where joy is unconstrained.
Prime minister’s questions appears now to be on an endless loop. A new dimension of space-time in which everything invariably comes back to the same point. The format is always the same. Keir Starmer asks some relatively straightforward question about an area of government policy he thinks isn’t working so well, and Rish! just denies it. Worse than that, he gets really upset if his reality is in any way challenged.
On Wednesday, the Labour leader homed in on immigration before the release of the latest figures due the next day. A fair question given the prime minister has three times stood on a manifesto to reduce net migration, only to see it increase year on year. You’d have thought even someone as out of touch as Sunak would have realised by now that something was wrong. Not that he would ever apologise. Men with Rish!’s sense of entitlement never say sorry for anything.
Sunak has drunk deep on his own Kool-Aid. He believes in himself. He believes he can fly. Touch the sky. Labour had got it all wrong. The fact that migration had gone up was a sure sign it was coming down. But just to be certain he would be making life more miserable for foreign students. One of the many groups of migrants most people actually want. Go figure.
And while he was about it, he wanted to put in a word for the International Monetary Fund. Normally he rubbishes their forecasts as they frequently indicate that the UK economy is tanking. But now he was falling over himself to boast the economy was expected to grow by 0.4%. A figure that will barely register on the consciousness of most sane people as it will be hard to tell the difference between that and flatlining.
After all, inflation is the key indicator of how well off most people feel. And that remains stubbornly high, with food inflation running at nearly 20%. What’s more, even if inflation did fall, it wouldn’t mean that the basics of food and heating would get any more affordable as prices aren’t about to start falling. They will just become more unaffordable marginally less quickly.
But none of this registers with Sunak. Week after week he merely parrots that all is for the best in the best of all Tory worlds. People should just stop moaning and open their hearts to the generosity of the government. Rish! is one of the world’s natural givers. He has reduced his salary from well over a million to little more than £160,000 as prime minister.
Such nobility. OK, he might have several little earners on the side, but the little people would do well to remember that some of his investments had been badly hit in the past few years. And have you ever heard him complain that the best part of a billion quid doesn’t buy what it used to? No. He has suffered in silence. So he would be obliged if the rest of us did likewise. Where was the gratitude these days?
Not that Starmer had it all his own way. Once PMQs had finished, Labour sent round an email saying that the Labour leader had just made a major policy announcement on immigration. Well, you could have fooled me. I sat through the whole thing along with many others and none of us detected anything remotely like a policy announcement.
I doubt even the Tory frontbench realised either. In fact, I’m certain they didn’t, as Rish! kept saying Labour had no ideas of its own and just complained about whatever the government did. And it was because it didn’t support the Conservatives that the government’s plans didn’t work. Blame Labour.
But on replaying the exchanges several times on Parliament TV, there was the barest outline of a Labour policy announcement. Something about getting rid of the 20% wage discount for overseas workers in jobs on the shortage occupation list.
Just how this would encourage more Brits to do the jobs they don’t want to do wasn’t immediately obvious. It’s going to take more than a 20% pay rise to get Brits working as fruit pickers and care workers. Maybe Starmer would have been better off saying all this in a speech rather than sandwiching it between gags about Suella Braverman’s efforts to avoid mixing with the riff-raff on a speed awareness course.
Then this PMQs was notable mainly as the one in which the speaker finally showed some authority. Normally Lindsay Hoyle is a complete pushover. All mouth and trousers. He threatens noisy MPs with a visit to the tea room but never really means it.
Only today he did. The Tory MP Paul Bristow was the fallguy. But it could have been any of the more obnoxious, braying Conservative backbenchers who never fail to live down to the occasion. It was almost as if Hoyle had come to the chamber looking for trouble. “I’ve given you a warning, Mr Bristow,” he said. “Now leave.” Only he hadn’t given Bristow any warning. It was one strike and you’re out.
Bristow couldn’t believe what was happening. He is used to having his childishness indulged and rewarded. Now he was expected to be a grownup. He tried to bluster it out. “What me?” Expecting, praying Hoyle would change his mind. Only he didn’t. Bristow turned red and made the walk of shame.
His fellow Tories, any of whom could just as easily been evicted, made a point of not catching his eye. They all suddenly became teenagers caught bang to rights. Nothing to do with me, guv. They all looked down, pretending they weren’t there. After that we were blessed with silence for the rest of the session. Subdued. Almost as if MPs had come to listen to proceedings, rather than disrupt them. Hoyle should try the tough guy act more often. It made for a pleasant change.
One MP who wasn’t in the Commons was Boris Johnson. But then, he seldom is. Too busy earning dirty money talking bullshit in Las Vegas. But he was uppermost in many people’s minds. Certainly Sunak’s. Who could possibly have guessed that Boris might have broken even more rules than we had possibly thought? So unlike him. But what great karma that it was his refusal to pay for his own lawyers that led to him being grassed up.
Johnson’s outriders were protesting loudly. It was all a plot to stitch up the former prime minister. The irony of their man being paid £250,000 for a half-hour off-the-cuff monologue while insisting he was being cancelled escaped them. They were out for blood. Paranoid that Sunak was behind the latest allegations. Unable as ever to distinguish between fantasy and reality. For the moment, Labour was a mere distraction. The real action was blue on blue.
