The Midas touch was always going to be too much of an ask. It’s far too late in the day for miracles. But the Tories had been expecting something a little better than what they’ve been given. To put it bluntly, Rishi Sunak is a disappointment. If he was a morning TV chatshow host he would have long since been sent out by his bosses to apologise for being alive. Though, given his current performance levels, he would probably have found a way to cock that up as well.
We had been led to believe that Rish! was a break with the past. A different type of prime minister than Boris Johnson and Liz Truss. Someone with little charisma – the Conservatives had had more than enough of personalities – but who could be trusted to have a basic level of competence. Would get up in the morning and dress himself successfully. Might even have read the contents of his red box rather than wing it. Expectations really were that low.
But more than six months on, the facade has begun to crack. Sunak is a mere shell of the man he once was. Or thought himself to be. Time and again he is left mouthing meaningless statements that not even he believes. That he has no idea who has been in power for the last 13 years. But when he finds out he will be sure to give them a good bollocking. Because they have screwed up big time. That things are getting so much better. The cost of living crisis has passed. The economy is booming. New hospitals are appearing by the day. That sort of nonsense. The stuff we all know is lies.
Worse still, he appears to have lost the use of language. Rish! was also meant to be one of the great communicators. Someone who could empathise. The tech bro multimillionaire who could feel our pain. Would suffer with us as the cost of heating his swimming pool soared. Except he can’t do any of this. Never could. His honeymoon period was just cognitive dissonance on our part. We were seeing what we had been told to see.
Now the wheels have well and truly come off. He can only speak in easily programmable sentences that can be used time and time again. In one 50-second soundbite after the disastrous local election results for the Tories, all he could manage was to repeat his five priorities a couple of times.
Somehow, he is achieving the seemingly impossible of making Theresa May sound like advanced AI. And to think that back in 2017, when she was hellbent on trying to lose the election, the Maybot was indistinguishable from 1980s dodgy Amstrad software. Only his close family can detect sentient life. Not that this would matter much if Rish! had some hope to offer. But the best he has is a not-exactly-managed decline. Blink and it’s freefall.
Sunak was at it again on Monday morning – looking very much the seven-year-old schoolboy in oversized adult boots – as he took to the Channel on a Border Force boat before giving a press conference in Dover. Trouble was, he didn’t really have anything much to say. But that wasn’t going to stop him. He was here to give an update on his “stop the boats” plan. He was here to give an update on his “stop the boats” plan. Two sentences in and he was already lost.
“We are making progress,” he said over and over again. Even though the evidence that his illegal migration bill had had any impact on this was negligible. Rather, it seemed far more likely that the slightly smaller number of small boat crossings this year had been due to bad weather. There again, it could have been that people were arriving from other routes or that the French had prevented more crossings.
Then Rish! was hopelessly confused. He thought the government was on target to clear the backlog of asylum applications by the end of the year. He didn’t say which year. 2025 at a push.
Simple maths is not Sunak’s strong point. He could have said that more than 500,000 of the people who came to the UK last year did so at the government’s invitation. To do the jobs the Brits won’t. To grow our economy. And of the 70,000 or so refugees who came by boat, roughly 90% were granted asylum. Rish! could stop the small boats by opening safe routes. But that wouldn’t play well with the bloodlust of the Tory right. So we are where we are. No one is happy. Nothing is working. And the buck stops with Mr Incompetence.
As it does with the Covid inquiry. Where yet again Sunak has managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of mediocrity. He is adamant that he wants the inquiry – that his own government appointed – to have all of the available information, but then does his best to keep his mitts on everything. He couldn’t look more guilty if he tried. Rish! claims he merely wants to save the inquiry time by not burdening it with irrelevant WhatsApps, notebooks and diaries.
But why not let Heather Hallett decide what is and what isn’t relevant? And see what the government was doing that it thought was more important than Covid. What does Sunak have to hide? His embarrassment over “eat out to help out”? That’s already priced in. His plots to remove Boris? Possibly. Just general levels of toxic incompetence. For sure.
It was left to Jeremy “why is it always me?” Quin, the junior Cabinet Office minister, to explain the government’s decision to seek a judicial review in order to not hand over anything it didn’t want to in a ministerial statement.
It was like this. The government really, really rated Hallett. She was a pillar of the judiciary. But she just couldn’t be trusted with any information to do with the prime minister. Then or now. Far better that the bereaved were shortchanged than the government embarrassed. However much Quin is being paid, it’s not enough. His soul has been sold several times over.
Professionalism, integrity and accountability. Your boys took one hell of a beating.
