I view human nature through the Techniscope ™® lens of 1960s Italian cowboy films. In Spaghetti Western World, the men we most despise are those who, when the chips are down, snatch an innocent peasant child and put a pistol to their temple, to use as a human shield until their demands are met. Our cowardly prime minister, cornered by the possibility of a catastrophic election defeat, has just done the same thing, but instead of merely manhandling an infant peon on the steps of a saloon, he is holding a gun to the head of the whole world and threatening the future of all life on Earth. See him now in His Name Is Sunak, Our Angel of Death, and You Must Prepare Your Coffin, Amigo (Gianfranco Parolini, 1968).
For Sunak has, in the face of all credible scientific evidence, and in naked contempt for the international court of civilised opinion, decided to grant hundreds of new licences for drilling for North Sea oil. Why? Is Sunak perhaps sexually aroused by the idea of being held in contempt on a global scale? Does he retire to his North Yorkshire mansion priapic and alone under a cloud of assumed loathing, wondering in the dark what he can do to make himself ever-more despised? Did Sunak choose his job as an investment banker because he enjoyed the rhyming slang connotations?
Or has saying that Keir Starmer thinks penises should be stapled to nuns’ faces, or whatever it was, not cut through in the way the Conservatives intended? Does Sunak know that deciding to oppose green initiatives, champion fossil fuels and rubbish those who attempt to address the climate crisis may be another weaponisable front in the culture war that is his increasingly enfeebled party’s only strategy for staying in power? But Sunak must know further drills will not ease our ills, as the companies whose ever-expanding profits he is enabling here sell 80% of what they extract on the international market; Sunak must know it could take decades for the new fields to deliver, so the idea that drilling solves an immediate problem is spurious; Sunak must know that when fire is burning down your house, it’s no use just standing in front of it and shouting, over and over again: “My main priority is to stop the boats.” Sunak must know all this. But imagine knowing all this, and being in a position to do something about it, and trying to make out none of it is a problem so you can smear your political opponents as hysterical killjoys who want to stop people having fun. Imagine being that much of an investment banker.
Sunak was cornered briefly on Monday by a BBC journalist who somehow slipped the sphincter of steel that usually protects the prime minister from questions and allows him to pretend that he is a great politician, his confidence untested by collision with anyone able to dissipate the sickening cheddar-thick smog of inane soundbite farts that perpetually surrounds him. Inevitably, Sunak tried to sunak his way out of an inquiry into whether he had personally flown to Scotland in his private jet by answering a question that hadn’t been asked, with some typical sunakery about people going on holiday. “If you or others think that the answer to climate change is getting people to ban everything that they’re doing,” Sunak sunaked, “to stop people flying, to stop people going on holiday, I mean, I think that’s absolutely the wrong approach.”
The patient journalist, breaking with obsequious BBC protocol, persisted. As did Sunak, sunaking himself into a classic double sunak. “If your approach to climate change is to say no one should go on holiday,” Sunak re-sunaked, petulantly, “no one should take a plane, I think you are completely and utterly wrong. Thanks very much for having me. Bye bye.” Though we’re used to seeing double sunaks during prime minister’s questions, it’s rare to see one in the wild, and Sunak’s Monday morning double sunak was an unexpected gift for fans of vacuous, yet simultaneously bad-tempered, evasion.
It’s transparently obvious that someone in Conservative HQ’s culture war black ops department has briefed Sunak and his cabinet to try to associate climate awareness with killjoys, and to associate climate awareness killjoys with the Labour party. And typically, no one does it more bluntly and obviously than the multiple-persona-sporting former internet grifter, ride-on lawnmower enthusiast, and secretary of state for energy security and net zero policy, Grant “Michael Green/Sebastian Fox/Corinne Stockheath” Shapps.
In July, Shapps, or one of his personae, wrote a stupid letter to Starmer on some special political notepaper, after heroic demonstrators spaffed paint on his office, saying: “I am writing to you to ask you to pay to repair the damage. The British public should not have to foot the bill for your mates in Just Stop Oil.” Shapps could establish a dangerous precedent. What if the world invoices him for the damage his mates in the oil industry are doing to the world? It will take more than a few dodgy online schemes to pay off that bill, Grant. Or should I say “Michael Green/Sebastian Fox/Corinne Stockheath” (delete as applicable)?
But we are where we are. Should we give up hope? In 60s Spaghetti western standoffs, the villain holding a hostage has usually reckoned without the sharpshooting skills of a 1950s American television star still inexplicably popular in Europe but long forgotten at home. But where’s our Lee Van Cleef? Sunak and the Tories have to go now. The actual future of the planet is at stake. Meanwhile, according to Sunak, apparently, Starmer thinks blah, blah, penis, blah, holiday, blah, identify, blah, blah, motorists, stop the boats.
Basic Lee tour dates are here. A fun-size ™ ® version of the show is at the Stand’s New Town theatre, Edinburgh, from 11 to 20 August
