Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad. Future students of British politics may yet write theses on Rishi Sunak’s upcoming week. It starts today with bizarre torture over his 2020 Covid performance, dives on Tuesday into a shambolic vote on his Rwanda bill and may well end with a crazed plot to topple him. All three events reflect the collapse of the central institution on which the British constitution rests: the cohesion of a stable parliamentary majority.
At this moment in time, for Sunak to spend an entire day being questioned on what is being staged as the crime of “eat out to help out” is humiliating and absurd. The Covid inquiry is a farce. It is a bunch of clever lawyers seeking newspaper headlines after spending half a million pounds on media consultants. The real question – whether lockdown was worth it – never gets a look-in. The inquiry should be stood down and handed over to proper historians.
