It’s Fright Night at Downing Street as the trick or treaters come to call. The selection box of sweets at the door is absent, ditto the apples for the bobbin’ and the occupant is anything but welcoming. The thing is, poor old Rishi Sunak, aka Gomez Addams, has already been through the Chainsaw Massacre. That was barely a couple of weeks ago, when his lot got slaughtered at two by-elections, with the only consolation for the carnage being that it involved seeing off the scary-even-without-costume Nadine Dorries. But inside No10 there is a sweet treat for welcome callers. That’ll be the celebration cake from this time last week for his first anniversary as PM. There’s quite a lot of it left.
The Chief Trick or Treater, Sir Keir Starmer, may be dressed as the Grim Reaper/Dementor, but he’s more scared than scary, isn’t he? The other figure who’s frightening even without dressing up is Ginger Spice, Angela Rayner. Her Union flag dress is all the rage in Labour just now. She’s got a smile that bodes ill for the boss. Unchained, she can be terrifying.
You have to wonder though, is the spectre that’s scaring Starmer out of sight… the crowd at the end of the street? Could it, just possibly, be the Labour MPs who are getting angrier and angrier that he’s not calling for a ceasefire in Gaza? And behind them all those voters who don’t like what they’re hearing from Labour on the Middle East crisis. The ghost outside is evidently not well disposed to the inmates. He was exorcised from Downing Street some time ago, but from the looks of things he wasn’t to be discarded lightly. It’s Dominic Cummings, who is about to steal the show today at the Covid inquiry, raising all manner of ghosts poor Rishi thought were laid to rest.
And if he’s looking malevolent, it might be to do with the rumour that he’s trying to conjure up a diabolic baby, a brand new political party to inhabit the corpse of the Tories. If you think that’s just a scary story, remember this is how Brexit happened, with Dom conjuring up the unthinkable; whether that was trick or treat depends where you’re coming from.
Of course behind little Rishi there are scarier figures. But the trouble with the most alarming, Michael Gove, who has emerged from his web at the back, is that his daggers could be plunged into the backs of his own side as well as into the callers — he just can’t help himself. He’s fiendishly clever — see that brainbox idea this week of giving freeholds to every leaseholder — but we know that his old aspiration was to be the occupant of the house himself. If I were little Rishi, I’d be glancing nervously behind my back.
And if I were he, I wouldn’t set too much store by the Frankenstein figure just behind him, making his way inexorably in the wrong direction. That’s Lee Anderson, deputy chairman of the party, who should be his right hand man, but has that alarming quality of the original Frankenstein, of turning on his maker. For now, though, he’s been quiet as he picked over the corpses of those Tories slaughtered in the two by-elections.
Forget the small cross figure of ET, the Home Secretary Suella Braverman, who is masquerading as an innocent alien. Or the Mogster.
The one little Rishi is — for now — depending on to see off his nemesis is Edward Scissorhands, aka, Jeremy Hunt, the Chancellor, who’s inside the house, on the prowl for the elusive tax cuts which won’t raise the spectre of inflation. And don’t forget the pumpkins, who are inhabited by the malevolent spirits of his predecessors. Everyone had assumed that the smirking Liz Truss one had been composted, but no.
As for the one with the shaggy quiff, he’s lying low. The Covid inquiry has had quite a lot to say about the Boris pumpkin.
As for Grim Reaper Starmer, what you have to realise is that he’s the least scary figure his party can conjure up. He is specially designed to lull voters about what might happen if Labour returned, with an unstoppable majority. The would-be spenders, the politically-off message, the Corbynites, the raging woke, all have a stake through their heart. For now…
