Rishi Sunak is reportedly unhappy as Prime Minister: I am not surprised. He is too shiny — possibly even too idealistic— to appreciate the novelistic possibilities of decline. It seems unlikely that he will be a successful Prime Minister — 13 years are stacked against him, alongside the furies of Boris Johnson and Liz Truss — but he could be something almost as memorable, and infinitely more interesting: a noble failure. But he will have to be bold. Is it in his mathematician’s nature? Probably not, but he is Prime Minister now: he should fit the suit handed to him.
In a perfect metaphor for their shrinking ambition, the Tories govern for a tiny sector of society: the aged. This is the only constituency the Tories have stood by over four Parliaments, and they stand by the Tories in turn. If they can stand. Beyond this sunlit world of soaring house values, paid-off mortgages, and triple-locked pensions, is the rest of Britain with its dismal view of expensive, insecure and rare housing stock. The last time we met the current annual target of 300,000 new homes a year was 1976. I was two.
