It was a no-brainer, I guess. A choice between doing the Today programme and Sky News, or a 20-minute stint on This Morning, on the day your government yet again misses its immigration targets. Though judging by how uncomfortable Rishi Sunak looked on the ITV sofa, maybe even that was a step too far for the prime minister. He just doesn’t have the homey, man-of-the-people vibes. Principally because he isn’t. Rish! oozes privilege out of every pore. The country is merely a Goldman Sachs case study.
“It’s great to be here,” said Sunak, looking like he couldn’t wait to head for the exit. As if he had realised that even the soft format could soon become rather uncomfortable. Alison Hammond may be a stand-in for Holly Willoughby and Craig Doyle may be a stand-in for a stand-in – Dermot O’Leary, the replacement for Phillip Schofield, was off celebrating his 50th birthday – but neither of them are mugs. Worryingly for Rish! they also talk human. So there was bound to be a culture clash.
Craig cut to the chase. Net immigration was at 606,000. Lower than expected – thanks mainly to the new way the Office for National Statistics calculates the figures – but still much higher than last year. What was going on?
“The numbers are too high,” Sunak said confidently. As if they were nothing to do with him. That they were just things he had inherited. Or he hadn’t been part of a Conservative government that had repeatedly promised but failed to bring them down. Yet again, he was going to be in for a hell of a shock when he found out who the prime minister was. Though he did have a plan to cut the numbers of dependants overseas students could bring with them. Who would be doing their jobs was anyone’s guess. It sure as hell wouldn’t be the Brits.
It’s out of control, Craig observed. Absolutely not! Rish! was mortified by the suggestion. Immigration was far higher than he wanted it to be, far higher than he had planned for it to be, but the idea that it was out of control was untrue. It was just that it wasn’t fully under control. There was a difference, apparently. Yet again we were in one of Sunak’s parallel universes: two contradictory statements can both be true. And both untrue.
He then insisted he spent lots of time out and about in cafes and restaurants meeting real people who all congratulated him on what he was doing about immigration. As if he spends most mornings in Caffè Nero. And he hasn’t met a real person for years, if ever. The whole point about being rich and being prime minister is that you never have to meet anyone who might think differently to you.
Within seconds, Sunak was at it again. Everyone he spoke to thought the Rwanda plan was a brilliant idea. Which is true only if you assume that the only people he has spoken to about it are Suella Braverman and the right wing of the Tory party. Everyone else has severe doubts about it. Either because they don’t think it will ever work or because it’s immoral and illegal.
Alison also observed that the NHS and social care would fall to bits without immigrants. Rish! just shrugged. Que sera, sera. You can’t have everything. Alison moved on to Suella. Why had he let her off the hook when she had clearly done something wrong? We were straight back to Schrödinger’s Sunak. It wasn’t that she had done something wrong. More that she hadn’t done something entirely right. She had tried to game the system – the rules are for the little people – but in the end had had to take the three points. So there wasn’t a story. She had tried to do the wrong thing and failed.
We then moved on to Sunak’s latest idiotic idea. An NHS app that will give patients more choice by directing them to hospitals on the other side of the country that either also have no capacity or have worse outcomes. It’s not even half witted: that would be to credit it with some merit. The solution is not to expand demand to even up the waiting lists across the country; it’s to increase supply. But this was also the day we learned that the 40 new hospitals weren’t going to be a reality before 2030 at the earliest. If then.
There was no time to discuss the cost of living crisis. There were far more important things to cover. Like Jilly Cooper. Did he really like her bonkathons? Ooh yes, said Sunak, not altogether convincingly. It sounded more like a PR stunt to make him sound more interesting that had somehow got out of control. Try and imagine him reading the smutty bits of Riders on the beach. You can’t, can you? He ended by being unable to think of anything he regretted. Not even appointing Suella as home secretary. Or not putting the kibosh on Boris’s resignation honours list months ago. Or not occasionally taking responsibility for his actions.
Meanwhile, Braverman had once again made herself unavailable. You’d have thought a vertebrate home secretary would step up to defend her record. To explain why immigration had gone up despite everything she had supposedly done to prevent it. But no, she had gone to ground. Probably too busy getting civil servants to fill in her tax return. Can you pass off a speeding fine as a legitimate business expense? If not, why not?
So it was left to Robert Jenrick to answer the inevitable urgent question on the ONS figures. Alas poor Jenrick, I knew him well. He was a man of infinite vest … Honest Bob, the man who sorts out any former pornographer’s planning requirements, is rapidly morphing into Hopeless Bob. SpongeBob, even. His best explanation for why none of the government’s plans had worked was that opposition parties had voted against them. He seemed clueless that the laws had actually passed anyway.
Just to prove that Hopeless Bob is ready to enter the crowded pantheon of useless Tory ministers, he then went on to say that the reason the government had been so slow to process asylum claims was because they didn’t want to make the UK too attractive to refugees. Despite it being government policy to expedite proceedings to get everyone to Rwanda. An admission that no one in government really has a clue. We should appreciate SpongeBob while we can. We won’t see his like again. Hopefully.
