Christmas must be a bundle of fun round the Sunaks’. 7am: 5km run. 8.30am: breakfast of granola with manuka honey. 9am: check against delivery to make sure all presents are under the tree. 10.30am: invite family to open presents. All members are to keep a profit and loss spreadsheet to make sure the presents they have received are more valuable than the ones they have given.
12pm: short Xmas lecture on the importance of winning. 12.30pm: all family members are to write a brief lessons-learned dashboard on the lecture. 2pm: lunch of organic turkey crown with no trimmings. 3pm: unfinished homework to be completed. 4-4.45pm: at leisure. No TV, console games or handheld devices. Children may read books if they want. 4.46pm: children and adults to write thank-you letters. 6.30pm: stop Alexa playing Ghost Town.
7.30pm: invite family to complete survey. Tick the option that best describes the day. A) I was very happy with my Christmas experience. B) I was quite happy with my Christmas experience. C) I was neither happy nor unhappy with my Christmas experience. D) I was quite unhappy with my Christmas experience. E) I was very unhappy with my Christmas experience. Now list one thing that would have improved your Christmas. 8.30pm: University Challenge. 9pm: bed.
Rishi Sunak is a conundrum. Schrödinger’s prime minister. The more you see of him, the less there appears to be. A man who doesn’t much care about anything. A man so rich he can afford not to be seen to even care about his wealth. His beliefs dictated by a Goldman Sachs training manual. The country just an intellectual playground for him. Its people just problems to be solved. Preferably with a PowerPoint presentation. He is a man without emotional affect. Either dead or empty inside. Or just completely disconnected.
All of which was just perfect for Rish!’s first appearance before the liaison committee – the supergroup select committee made up of the committee chairs that Bernard Jenkin, the liaison chair, allows to attend. And admittedly this time Jenkin had chosen a predominantly D-list cast of committee chairs – all the really good ones have either been promoted or excluded – so Sunak was not unduly taxed. But even so, he was perfectly robotic in his meaningless management bollocks replies. His handlers would have been thrilled. He didn’t even once make eye contact with anyone in the room.
Alicia Kearns, the new chair of the foreign affairs committee, went first. In a hurry to make a splash. Was the government growing cold on Ukraine? Absolutely not, said Rish!. It was just that he could never appear too excited about anything. Was he going soft on China? No, it was a coincidence that Chinese diplomats had been allowed to leave before they were expelled.
“Are you robust?” Kearns persisted.
“I’m really, really robust,” Sunak replied.
“But are you?”
“I am. I am,” he creaked in a grinding monotone. He was the most robust person in the room. More robust than anyone. When no one was looking he made RPGs to give to Ukraine in his spare time.
Jenkin started to hurry the committee chairs up. He didn’t want them accidentally asking any pertinent questions. And besides, Rish! had said he could only spare 90 minutes of his time. Most prime ministers gave up two or three hours to the liaison committee. But Sunak had promised not to say anything worthwhile, so why go to the trouble of wasting everyone’s time?
OK, said Diana Johnson, the home affairs committee chair, one of the brighter members on view. How big would the backlog of unprocessed refugees be next year? Er … We’d clear up most of this year’s backlog, apart from the ones we wouldn’t count. And then there would be a backlog of all the refugees who would arrive next year. So we’d be back where we started. But Rwanda would help a lot. Refugees would just see what an ideal destination it was and would try to get there directly. So we’d save ourselves a fortune in air fares. Or something.
We then moved on to the cost of living. Was there anything he regretted about his time as chancellor? Rish! thought for a minute. Not really, he said. He’d done everything pretty much perfectly. As was plain to see. Though if he did have a fault it was that the UK was not quite ready for his brilliance. Or his modesty.
Inflation was an issue, Sunak admitted. Though he made it sound like an abstract irritant rather than a matter of heating or eating. Certainly not something that lost him any sleep. Nor was he that bothered about food banks. On balance he would prefer that people didn’t use them, but he wasn’t going to stop anyone. It was almost as if he had misheard the question. Except he clearly hadn’t. Food banks are just too alien a concept to impinge on his blinkered reality.
Nor was Rish! much interested in the first-ever strikes taking place in the NHS. Nurses and ambulance staff ought to be happy with people clapping them. And he was saddened that they wanted more money because he had hoped they wouldn’t be so greedy as to want more than a real-terms pay cut. Shame there wasn’t someone in the room from the NHS to put him right.
Sunak was equally condescending when it came to Scotland. He would be delivering for Scotland. He couldn’t say what he would be delivering or when he would be delivering it, but he expected the Scots to be grateful when he did deliver something. On his delivery dashboard.
Various committee members sneaked off before the end. Well, they might. We had learned nothing. Other than Rish!’s complacency. Listening to him speak, you’d think the country had never been in better shape. When the reality is we’re all Christmas Sunakered.
