It’s becoming increasingly hard to see the point of Rishi Sunak. Or if indeed he ever had one. Other than back in the summer when it was clear he wanted to be prime minister. He was Ready 4 Rish! But since getting the top job he’s lacked direction. Lacked purpose. His only mission being to survive another day in office. All he can offer is a sense of managed decline. Party before country. Trying to stumble on to the next election and hoping to minimise the inevitable losses.
What’s more, he doesn’t much seem to care about anything very much. He just doesn’t have the human touch. Maybe it’s the £730m that cocoons him from the realities of the country. Maybe he just can’t help it. It’s just the way he is.
Rish! radiates privilege and indifference. Not that he doesn’t sometimes say the right things. Just that he never manages to do so in a way with which normal people can connect. There is no empathy. It’s as if the UK is a social science experiment and we are all his lab rats. He is the Goldman Sachs tech bro who can only talk in hollow soundbites from a management consultant’s training manual.
We’ve reached the point where Sunak is almost guaranteed to give the wrong response – the tone deaf response – to any given question. Which is why he’s been dying on his feet at every prime minister’s questions. So much for a new leader getting a honeymoon period in the Commons. All that Rish! can look forward to on a Wednesday is having his arse handed to him on a plate.
There was a time when Labour was reluctant to bring up private education. Too much like class war. But it’s a measure of Keir Starmer’s confidence in taking on Sunak that he chose to open PMQs with an attack on the tax breaks for private schools. How did he justify giving £6m to, say, Winchester – Sunak’s old school – when the yearly fees were more than £45k?
And just to be helpful, the Labour leader reminded the Commons that Michael Gove had described the VAT exemption as totally egregious. Gove reddened slightly, but didn’t look unduly bothered. The levelling up minister has been cutting an ever more semi-detached figure in the Tory party of late. As if he knows they are all on borrowed time. That all of his colleagues are decidedly second rate. That their time is up.
Sunak looked trapped. He knew he was meant to come out with something clever, something pugnacious. But he just sounded as if he was pretending. Going through the motions of being somebody else. Somebody better. First he tried to say that schools had flourished during Covid under the Tories. Er, hello. The government had to be shamed into providing free school meals by Marcus Rashford. And then there was the exams fiasco.
That was arguably his strongest line. After that it was all downhill. It was fine for four out of 10 children at schools in Southampton to fail their English GCSE while, up the road, Winchester got cash handouts. Because it gave the kids in state schools something to aim for. Starmer was against aspiration, Rish! said. So now we know where we are. Anyone happy with their state school must really really hate their kids.
Starmer carried on punching the bruise. While we were on aspiration, how were the Tories’ housebuilding projects going? Oh, that’s right. He had forgotten. They weren’t going anywhere because dozens of nimby Tory backbenchers didn’t want any new homes in their constituencies. Just in case they attracted the wrong kind of buyers. The lower orders. But if Sunak was too weak to control his own party, Labour would be happy to lend a hand by voting with the government.
By now Sunak was a wreck. A hollowed out shadow. He blurted out anything that came to mind. Anything that might sound anti-Labour. Starmer was in favour of trade unions. Yup. And so is most of the country these days. Everyone can appreciate the system is broken when nurses and other NHS workers are having to use food banks. When people are leaving the public sector because they can no longer afford to work there.
“Labour is the politics of yesterday,” Rish! concluded. Mmm. Because it was the Tories who were opposed to onshore windfarms and affordable housing. Makes sense. Not. The collapse continued when the SNP’s Ian Blackford challenged him to list one benefit of Brexit. “We’ve taken back control of our borders,” said Sunak. Huge, if true. And Covid vaccines. Again, huge if true. But that was about it.
A few Tories shouted “more”. It wasn’t clear if they wanted Sunak to remind them of more Brexit wins, apart from the trade deals that had made us worse off but more British – clue: there aren’t any – or if they had dozed off during the earlier exchanges and were under the impression that Rish! had shown unexpected levels of competence. Either way it was all rather odd. In any case, the Tory benches emptied rapidly thereafter. It’s too painful to stay till the end.
Unluckily for Alex Burghart, he wasn’t given the choice. The most junior minister in the Cabinet Office had the short straw of answering an urgent question on why the government had yet to appoint a new ethics adviser. Like his boss, Burghart crashed and burned. Then again, anyone in his position would. Because yet again the government is in chaos.
Labour’s Angela Rayner wondered if it was because no one wanted the job, given that the previous adviser, Lord Geidt, had quit after being made to look a fool. Absolutely not, Burghart insisted. Geidt had resigned because he had been doing the job far too well. Besides, there was nothing much to investigate. Apart from Dominic Raab and Suella Braverman.
Just relax. Trust the process. Trust Rish! If only.
A year in Westminster with John Crace, Marina Hyde and Armando Iannucci
Join John Crace, Marina Hyde and Armando Iannucci for a look back at another chaotic year in Westminster, live at Kings Place in London, or via the livestream.
Wednesday 7 December 2022, 7pm-8.15pm GMT. Book tickets here
