The enemies of Rishi Sunak are unnamed, but you can probably guess them from their promises: one source told the Mail on Sunday that they were planning an “Advent calendar of shit” to destabilise the prime minister. What would that look like? Robert Jenrick sabre-rattling that Rwanda didn’t go far enough one day; rumours of a Boris Johnson comeback – yes, as actual PM – the day after; “friends” of Jacob Rees-Mogg doing a ring-round to canvass support for a putsch the next? Yup, that sounds pretty Adventy.
Blue-on-blue attacks are never that – there is always an intermediary, some group upon whom the opponent has not been tough enough. So we can expect a daily cascade of nonsense, in which people are in poverty because universal credit is too high, or the NHS is in crisis because doctors are lazy, or culture is broken because transgender people exist.
“Never distract your enemy while he’s making a mistake” used to be quite a niche Napoleon quote, acres below “If you want it done well, do it yourself” – but now that enemies are everywhere and always making mistakes, it comes up quite a lot. I doubt this is going to distract them, however. They heed only one another, and their headroom is entirely taken up vying for the accolade “most unpleasant”. But, perhaps naively – or maybe just lulled by the experience of the past 50 years – I thought they might give themselves a rest over Christmas.
It’s a bad time of year to be a red in tooth and claw kind of Tory. Christianity isn’t always rock-solid on its progressive politics, but the nativity is pretty clear on a few things, such as: Jesus was a refugee; homelessness isn’t a lifestyle choice. Political vandals might feel confident outbidding each other on who can have the least sympathy for benefit claimants the rest of the year, but around about this time, when supermarkets have put in toy banks so you can donate to families who can’t afford presents, it’s that much harder to get the crowd behind you. It’s just one of those peculiar things, that when you are bedding into a fortnight during which you’ll spend too much and eat too much, watching politicians performatively dump on the desperate, well, it spoils it. Nothing reminds you more forcefully of those less fortunate than yourself than Suella Braverman vowing to criminalise rough sleepers.
The ideal kind of Conservative MP to be for Advent is the kind who likes traditional values such as “sherry”, to whom Britishness means carolling, whose biggest beef with modernity is that someone put a lardon on their Brussel sprouts. If any of them can even remember what “one nation Tory” means, that’s the look to dust down. The world and his dog are just about to enter a series of gatherings in which not everyone will agree, and the mood is very much: “If you don’t absolutely have to say it, save it for later.” This is emphatically not the time we want to watch one MP finger-jabbing at another about what constitutes a woman and who or what is a wokerati.
This is in the DNA of the Tory rebel wing that was created, emboldened, sustained and, ultimately, empowered by Brexit: they take a look at the national mood, and do the opposite – pantomime cruelty in the season of pantomimes, unrelenting mean spirit in the season of goodwill.
Would it be the end of the world for their Advent calendar to succeed? It would see off an unelected, inadequate prime minister, to put another, crazier one in his place – and that might be a good thing, assuring annihilation at a general election whose date will have been necessarily brought forward. Plus, it might be fun to watch.
Nevertheless, the thought of them reaching their peak on 24 December, flexing over who can be the most vindictive towards an asylum seeker, between the person who wants to fly him to Rwanda and the one who wants to trap him on a barge, is coming close to killing Christmas. I thought that was the wokerati’s job.
• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
