The marketing apparatchiks have taken to calling it Blue Monday. That day in January when you are generally feeling about as bad as you are ever going to feel all year. Anxious, depressed and broke. A time to go heavy on the Valium and Prozac. Just try to get through to better days relatively unscathed.
Rishi Sunak doesn’t have to worry about being short of cash. He’s got more than he can reasonably spend in any number of lifetimes. But he’s sure as hell buying whatever else is on offer. Because days don’t come much bluer than this Blue Monday. He’d always imagined he’d be a brilliant prime minister. Not because he had the necessary qualities but because everyone has always said he’s brilliant whatever he’s done. He’s Mr Brilliant. The Entitled One.
Only being prime minister has been a lot tougher than he imagined. You can’t get away by just sprinkling random stardust. The world has not bent to his will. He has been found out. Four of his five pledges in tatters. The other one – inflation – irrelevant; it was never in his gift anyway.
Nor does he have the common touch, an easy way of connecting with people with whom he has nothing in common. Instead Rish! regards them as aliens. As they do him. And on Monday a new verdict came in via an opinion poll in the Daily Telegraph: the Tories were facing electoral annihilation.
This was not exactly news. Other polls had more or less predicted this. But this one was a wee bit special. Its sample was large and it was published in the Conservative party’s daily prayer book. The word of God. Voters didn’t like Sunak and they didn’t like his policies. After 14 years, almost everyone had had enough: they didn’t feel better off and the country was falling apart. The Conservatives had no one to blame but themselves.
And everything was about to get a whole lot worse. Because later in the week, parliament would be voting on his small boats Rwanda bill. With a significant number of rightwing Tory MPs desperate to force through amendments to make it even more punitive, and a small number of moderates squeaking that “enough was enough”. Something would have to give. No one was quite sure what. It all felt a bit like the end of days.
So Sunak began Blue Monday with a pointless trip to Essex. Probably his therapist had recommended it. “If you’re feeling as if the world is against you and you just can’t cope then try to get out of bed and do something. Anything. It doesn’t matter what. You’ll start to feel better about yourself.” At least that was the hope. Fake it to Make it.
Um, the polls are just polls, he said to a passing TV camera. Let’s wait and see what happens in the election. He was fooling no one. Because if he really believed that he wouldn’t be delaying the election till the end of the year. Most Tories are under the weird misapprehension that what’s really holding them back is that they aren’t even more rightwing. There’s no accounting for crass stupidity.
“Stick with change,” he added. This was a car crash. The wheels had long since fallen off. Either you’re the continuity man or you’re the change candidate. You can’t be both. The truth is he’s neither. Just a piece of electoral jetsam, spat out by the Tories. Someone is going to have to rethink the messaging yet again. Not that it will make any difference.
Still, Rish! had a slightly better time of it in the afternoon when he made a statement to the Commons about the military action taken against the Houthis last Thursday. Largely because it is one of the few things on which every Tory MP – and most Labour MPs, come to think of it – can agree. The man who has spent the past 12 months getting so much wrong has finally done something right. Or right-ish. For all his many faults, Sunak is not a man to casually take us to war like an unserious David Cameron. He will have agonised about this.
The Commons was unusually full for a Monday afternoon. Maybe there are more MPs than we think who suffer from seasonal affective disorder and need to get out more. Even Matt Hancock was there, with trademark pink tie dangling. I wish he’d have his midlife crisis somewhere else. But then he’s there to serve. Yawn. Lord Big Dave couldn’t be bothered to show up and watch from the peers’ gallery. Probably still trying to find Yemen on the map.
Sunak began by saying this had been a limited, targeted strike. It was done entirely in self-defence and had nothing to do with the fighting in Israel and Gaza. This sounded like wishful thinking. The Houthis are funded by Iran, which is desperate to cause unrest in the Middle East.
Pretending that this isn’t the case and that the Houthis have just started attacking shipping for target practice is expedient at best. Then it helps to keep things binary. After all, sitting back and doing nothing when British ships come under attack also isn’t an option. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
Keir Starmer offered unequivocal support. Though he did ask with what confidence Sunak could say his objectives had been met. Rish! wisely chose not to answer. The Houthis are used to being attacked – the Saudis have been bombing them for a decade – so one limited strike isn’t going to cause them to lose much sleep. No one dared to say what would happen when the Houthis and Iran recommenced their attacks.
Every Tory MP agreed that the attack had been just what was needed, though some wondered why the navy hadn’t taken more of a central role. It could be because we don’t really have much of a navy: our two aircraft carriers are in dock in the UK.
Even the members of the Labour awkward squad – Apsana Begum, Zarah Sultana et al – weren’t that awkward. Nor was Jeremy Corbyn. They just wanted more recognition that everything in the Middle East was connected. You didn’t get to choose what was and wasn’t an isolated incident. Sunak didn’t bite, though. Nor did he seem that bothered by the mounting death toll in Israel and Gaza. Maybe that’s last year’s war. In any case, I guess he’d got other things to worry about on Blue Monday. Roll on the Rwanda bill.
