Even the losers get lucky sometimes. This hasn’t been Rishi Sunak’s week. Or month. Or six months, even. Life hasn’t been kind for our gilded prince. Normally he only has to click his fingers and things fall into his lap. But running a country has proved to be a lot tougher than he expected. Partly because he’s not very good at it. Yet also because real life doesn’t often obey a Goldman Sachs handbook. Just working long hours with an ordinary brain doesn’t cut it.
Inflation remains stubbornly high. Government debt is higher than ever. The economy is flatlining, barely out of recession. Growth is the lowest of all G7 countries. The government’s Rwanda plan has been deemed illegal. Hospital waiting lists are stubbornly high. So much so that death is almost preferable for some patients.
For the first time in his life, Rish! is failing badly. The country knows it. Tory MPs know it. And deep down, in the maws of his troubled subconscious, he also knows it. Every day, it’s all he can do to pedal hard enough to keep one step ahead of his psyche. Doing his best to keep cognitive dissonance alive. To believe that he can make a difference. Praying for an even break. And on Tuesday, he got one.
Normally an appearance before the liaison committee – the supergroup of select committee chairs – is something of an ordeal for the prime minister. David Cameron and Boris Johnson would regularly find themselves being grilled for more than two and a half hours on two or three topics. The sessions were often tetchy and intense. A test of nerve during which the limitations of the prime minister were exposed.
The liaison chair, Bernard Jenkin, sees his committee’s role rather differently. Mainly ceremonial. A committee that goes through the motions of appearing to ask questions of Sunak but never in such a way as to make life awkward for him. Rather as a matter of form. Bernie is more than happy to indulge Rish! at every turn. He’d only like to stay for 90 minutes, if that was OK? Of course it was. The committee could wrap up 10 minutes early if each member kept their questions to little more than five minutes. Just enough time to go nowhere.
“Um, I won’t actually be asking any questions myself,” Bernie added. Mmm. Could that be because Jenkin has his own local difficulty of allegations surrounding his attendance at a birthday party for his wife during lockdown? Surely not … It was pure coincidence that Jenkin was keen to rush things through.
Within 20 minutes, half the committee looked comatose and one person in the public gallery appeared to have passed out. Boredom can do that to you. Bob Neill had asked for joined-up government, Alicia Kearns wanted a united stance against Ukraine and Greg Clark wittered on about AI. All worthy, but oh so dull.
Imagine having a free pop at the prime minister and that being the best you could come up with. Sunak’s own AI appeared barely connected. Operating on sleep mode. You could doze off and miss the apocalypse listening to Rish!. It was just politics by spreadsheet numbers. “We are delivering on the priorities which the country wants us to deliver on,” he droned. It was hard to tell if he was alive himself. Maybe he had sent along his second best avatar.
Things picked up a bit when Diana Johnson asked about the Rwanda policy. Was there a plan B if the supreme court agreed with the court of appeal? Er … There wasn’t. Because the supreme court was definitely going to find in favour of the government.
OK, then, said Johnson. Let’s assume it does. There are more than 8,000 refugees potentially awaiting deportation and Rwanda has said it can only take 500 at most. So where would all the others go? Rish! looked shifty. They would be going to Rwanda as well. We would just be packing them all on the same plane and hoping no one noticed. For a moment, it looked like the committee might be on the verge of doing its job. A worrying thought for Bernie, who hastily shut Johnson down. “Time’s up,” he snapped. Breathing a massive sigh of relief.
Other members were also cut off in their prime. So we only got to hear Sunak explain why we’ve all never had it so good. People should be more grateful for what he had done. Rish! genuinely believes that. He needs to feel the love, the gratitude. Mortgage holders should just extend their loans and learn to live longer. Britain was a modern day Utopia.
William Wragg chose to make mischief by asking about appointments to the House of Lords. Nothing to do with me, Guv, Sunak insisted. All he’d ever done was pass stuff on. So would he be having his own resignation honours list next year some time? Bernie looked up hopefully. A peerage. Dare he hope? Rish! shook his head. Hadn’t given it a thought. To be fair, he’ll have plenty of time to get to that very soon.
It was left to Chris Bryant to really make waves. Though he too was cut off at the legs by having to race through his questions in record time. How come Sunak couldn’t be bothered to announce government policy in parliament? Why wouldn’t he ask the seven Tory MPs named by the privileges committee to apologise?
How come he found time for cricket but not for standards? Had he read the report? Oh, he hadn’t. Strange because it was only a few pages. And he’d found time to ask Zac Goldsmith to apologise.
And. And. And. So many breathless questions. And no real answers. Sunak was struggling for respectability. Integrity. Self-worth. He found none of them. A real committee would have gone for the kill. Instead Bernie rushed to the prime minister’s side. He was deeply sorry for the tone of the questions. He was sorry Bryant had been so rude and had gone on for so long. Perhaps he’d rather hear Steve Brine tell him what a great guy he was.
“May I say how brilliant you are,” oozed Brine. “Thank you, thank you, thank you. I love you so much.” Sunak smiled. This was more like it. But all good things come to an end. And bad things. Bernie looked at his watch. So little time. So little to say.
