A thought experiment. If Tory MPs could return to year zero, who out of the misfits currently available would they choose as prime minister?
Boris Johnson? Do they really want the has-been Convict who can scarcely be bothered to take an interest in his own life? Nigel Farage? Are they really so mad that they think half the country is seriously bigoted? Suella Braverman? Ditto.
One thing we can be fairly clear about. Given their choices again, the Tories definitely wouldn’t choose Rishi Sunak. The safe pair of hands tech bro who can’t even back up his WhatsApp messages. So sad, that. The prime minister who keeps getting everything wrong.
A man without friends. Most prime ministers have a core group of allies. Rish! has no one to watch his back. Apart from possibly Jeremy Hunt. Who quite likes him. A bit. And who cares what Jezza thinks? Least of all about the economy.
But it’s the Tory MPs’ misfortune to be lumbered with Sunak. And ours, of course. Not that the Conservatives give a second thought to our concerns. Especially not now when they are locked into a narcissistic death spiral.
This is all about them. What they want. The country doesn’t get a look in. It’s all about making do for Tory backbenchers. Even they could see that imposing yet another prime minister on the country is a non-starter. So it’s all about minimising the potential losses.
Look the part. Fake it to make it. So there were huge cheers as Rish! entered the chamber for the last prime minister’s questions of the year. It was all most confusing. What was all the noise for? For having not been the first prime minister since Margaret Thatcher in 1986 to lose a bill at second reading? For having come up with a Rwanda plan that was so vicious, so deranged, that only a psychopathic idiot could have come up with it? Imagine being able to choose your own reality.
Weirdly, Rish! seemed to find it all perfectly normal. His arrogance and blinkered life experience have encouraged him to confuse irony for sincerity. The cheers were no more than he expected. At last, MPs were beginning to express their gratitude for all he had done. So he bounced up and down excitedly. He was a Winner! He would still be PM by the end of the year! 2024 might never happen! The polls showing him to be less popular than Johnson? He was right on track.
The sense of disconnect was to pervade the entire session. The sense of the surreal. That you couldn’t quite believe politicians could be so half witted. Deliberately so. It started with Tory Greg Smith declaring that the Office for Budget Responsibility was hopeless and the real forecasts showed the Tories were introducing the biggest ever tax cuts while the marginal tax rate was at its highest. Rish! had no problem with this. He was a fiscal magician.
Keir Starmer tried to insert a modicum of reality into the proceedings. Though he did start off with a couple of festive gags about the Tories being a “Five Family” of good cheer and Sunak being a Rishi-no-mates. Sunak looked hurt. The government was united behind him. Yup. United to stab him in the back. He had Something Inside So Strong. Which was why he would be building the barriers around Rwanda. Or something.
By now Rish! was beginning to get tetchy again. The all too familiar Snippy Rishi. The PM who couldn’t tolerate even the most gentle questioning. Whose reasonable facade soon turns to dust. He couldn’t even manage a word of sympathy for the man on the Bibby Stockholm who was believed to have killed himself the day before.
There was an equal lack of sympathy for those who were homeless at Christmas. Especially the kids. Why did everyone expect presents these days? Or even a roof over their head or a warm meal? The British people had gone soft. If children couldn’t be arsed to work for a living, why should they be indulged? Young people were all take, take, take.
How about a little more appreciation for what he had done? Rish! was sick to death of being mistaken for someone who gave a shit about the least well off. What had they ever done for him? Hell, he had gone out of his way to try to send the economy into a recession, to make it impossible to get a hospital appointment and to make sure inflation raced along at an unsustainable level. Where was the thanks? The country was living the dream under the Conservatives. Apart from the lack of pool cleaners. That was intolerable.
Things didn’t improve when Sunak moved on to backbenchers’ questions. The same sense of total disconnect. The feeling that whatever world the prime minister lives in, it wasn’t the same one as the rest of us. An altered reality where we are human guinea pigs in a macabre gameshow. So, no. there was no need for the DUP to ever return to a power-sharing assembly. Why change the habit of a lifetime?
The fact that the government was booking up hotel accommodation for asylum seekers till 2030? That in no way should be taken as any indication the government thought the small boats crossings would still be an issue in 2030. It was typically shoddy thinking of the Labour party to assume this. Talking down Britain.
Rish! ended with a note of Christmas cheer for Gaza. There could be no respite from the bombardment for the Palestinian kiddies until the Hamas terrorists who raped and murdered the Israelis were brought to justice. Though oddly, he was happy to turn a blind eye to the Rwanda-backed insurgents who raped and murdered in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Because we had declared Rwanda to be a safe country. So these murders had been safe murders.
Welcome to Sunak’s moral microverse.
Depraved New World by John Crace (Guardian Faber, £16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy and save 18% at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
