As Rishi Sunak tooled around Disneyland last week on his family holiday, I tried to imagine his government as a theme park. Instead of a rollercoaster, there would be a sign reading “Keir Starmer doesn’t want you to have a rollercoaster”. Instead of a log flume, there would be an artlessly defensive attempt to convince you that “the blob” says you can’t even not have a log flume any more. There would be no foot-long churros; foot-long churros are woke. The wrong type of visitors would be invited to “fuck off back to Disneyland Paris”. I know what you’re thinking: “Ooh, where is this place? Take all my money right now! Oh, wait, you already have.” But fun-wise, we’re looking at an empty field round which various off-brand cartoon characters (the cabinet) are stumbling ineffectually in search of today’s slogan. In short: imagineers wanted.
Imagineer was the name Walt Disney used for those of his employees he charged with realising his vision – creating ideas and then bringing them to life by building them. You may like the Disney vision; you may not. But you can’t deny it is phenomenally successful and as competently executed as it is coherent. It seems very unfair that some people’s epithet for something you can’t take seriously is “Mickey Mouse”. Have they not heard of “Rishi Sunak”?
The prime minister and governing party are now so reflexively negative that they increasingly seem capable only of telling you what they aren’t. This is an administration that feels so totally out of ideas that it is hard to remember the last time the government gave the impression of doing anything that a normal person would recognise as governing. Instead, it apparently has its eye fixed unwaveringly on the next general election. Quite bizarrely, the Conservative party’s sole actual policy seems to be that it would be a very good idea if the Conservative party won it. But why? To do what? In Martin Amis’s novel The Information, there’s one character who always feels like he desperately wants a cigarette even while he is actually smoking a cigarette. The Tories seem obsessed to the exclusion of all else with the remote possibility they could form the next government, even when they are actually the current government. Guys, live a little! Maybe even govern a little?
Living in permanent campaign mode was one of the many diseases gifted to our politics by Boris Johnson, whose sole political philosophy was “I should be prime minister”. Once he became prime minister, he didn’t have a thought in his head as to what he wanted to do with the job, and anyway wasn’t any good at it. Yet Johnson’s sole political philosophy became “I should stay prime minister”. These days, his sole political philosophy is “I should be prime minister again”.
There is a similar failure of imagination at the heart of this entire current government, whose intellectual and ideological underpinnings these days amount to asking: “Don’t you realise Labour would be worse?” I’m sure we all hate to break it to the Conservatives, but the British people are well into the “so what?” phase of their engagement with that particular question. As far as turning things around goes, Sunak’s administration seems to have decided that posturing is in order. Thus not a day passes without being able to read somewhere about why some pose is being adopted by the government. Huge amounts of time and focus are being lavished on “hitting Starmer where it hurts”, “opening up a clear dividing line” and “hammering our attack lines”.
I’m sorry they’ve become so mindbogglingly unmoored from reality, but almost all of this sounds totally mad to people outside the bubble who require real solutions to a mushrooming range of real problems. Every time I read some Conservative strategist honking out this nonsense in an off-the-record quote, I am sure I am not alone in thinking: “Have you thought of simply … being a government?” Apparently not. Instead, we have this form of complete affectation – style over substance at a time of struggle for much of the country, when true substance is desperately needed. Almost everything people can see the government doing is not policy in any meaningful sense. At best, it is policy-effect, a pseudopolicy designed to give the impression of policy.
Take the Bibby Stockholm. The moral objections to housing asylum seekers on this accommodation barge in a Dorset harbour are well documented. But parking that for a moment, what even is this policy, practically speaking? There were 39 people on the barge, who were removed on Friday after legionella bacteria were discovered on board. Between Thursday and Saturday last week, 1,608 migrants arrived in the UK on small boats. Nobody, at all, thinks this “policy” is going to work even on its own grim terms.
Different but equally valid questions are being asked about the supposed policy of using disused RAF bases to house migrants for between three to five years, or longer. I suppose the lesson of the past few years in British politics is that it can always get worse. Consequently, we are this week looking at a situation in which former home secretary Priti Patel is able to take the moral high ground with the current home secretary, Suella Braverman, over this plan. (This is the same Priti Patel who was once hugely taken with the idea of using wave machines to push back migrant dinghies in the Channel.) Dame Priti – she was recently made a dame for services to total uselessness – has just written to Braverman effectively accusing her and the immigration minister, Robert Jenrick, of being “evasive”, and offering an “alarming and staggering” lack of clarity over their plans for a site near her constituency. Patel’s assumption is that the Home Office pair are being “secretive” – yet perhaps the more troubling reality is that there is no secret plan for anything at the department. There is merely a home secretary flak jacket, a press release machine, and a single swinging lightbulb where the institutional brain should be.
Presumably Priti Patel will now be added to the list of entities conspiring against Sunak’s government coming anywhere close to adequacy, after a full 13 years of Conservative prime ministers. She would join the aforementioned blob, lefty lawyers, the opposition, and no doubt multiple other impediments yet to be unveiled on Sunak’s long run-up to the election. And yet, everything being someone else’s fault is surely not the most appealing strategy (certainly not in leaders you’d wish to emulate, anyway). Imagine having all those enemies and still being your own worst one.
Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
