Sa lot to hold the nerves. Rishi Sunak seems to have lost his. He looks beaten. The man who has lived all his life inside a golden protective cage – the head of Winchester, Oxford, Goldman Sachs, the Conservative Party – is now powerless to avoid defeat. The real world has finally caught up with him. Or him with him. There are no easy solutions. Only barely managed relegation. It is no longer a question of whether it fails. The only game in town is when.
You can feel the desperation in Sunak’s body language. His shoulders are hunched. A little man who gets even smaller. His eyes look sunken, half dead. His speech was reduced to a tired monotone. His response was piecemeal: neither funny nor intelligent. Deep down, somewhere in the hell that is his subconscious, he knows the game is up.
And so do their backbenchers. Week by week there are more green spaces for Prime Minister’s Questions alongside the Commons government. His MPs should stay away. Partly because they are desperate to garner support in their own constituencies as they try to hang on to their seats. But mostly because they can’t stand the stench of Sunak’s failure. In case they rub. Anything not remembered by its own sense of transience. Not to mention useless.
Somehow, though, the show must go on. So when Rish! he can’t invent a reason not to be there – perhaps the prime minister of Sweden would appreciate another visit – he’s obliged to show his face in parliament. And every time he does, he looks increasingly unconvincing. The shell of power cracked open, to reveal nothing but need and ambition. There is no real talent for government. Not to lead the country. Rather, it is a mere human piece, helplessly swept along by the waves of public debt, inflation, interest rates and the cost-of-living crisis. The bad news keeps coming and coming and even Sunak knows he is powerless to stop it. All he can do is ask people to hold their nerve. The final act of someone who knows he’s out of ideas. Like trying to survive a nuclear attack by hiding under the kitchen table.
For Keir Starmer it’s almost too easy. There are so many lines of attack, it’s hard to know where to start. But since Labor this week tries to position itself as the party of home ownership, it was dedicated to housing. In the Tory leaflets for the Uxbridge by-election, they were against the target of 300,000 new homes a year. However, this goal appeared to be government policy. Could Rish! put everyone out of their misery and tell us what the real Conservative policy was?
I could not. Rish! it was more or less incoherent. He couldn’t say whether 300,000 houses had been built or not – presumably it depends on whether you consider thousands of empty cardboard boxes to be luxury penthouses – but he did know that he had built more than the workers. Starmer didn’t have the heart to tell him it was because the Tories had been in power for the past 13 years. Sunak will kick himself when he finds out.
“He’s given up,” observed Starmer. Sunak had retreated into denial. Its safe place where it was still fully functional. His claims of being 100% there turned out to be hopelessly broad. Unless I was talking about hallucinogens. He is 100% in these. In fact, it gives the impression of someone close to a psilocybin overdose. Your contact with reality the simple touch of a finger.
Rish! he could only mumble something about the work that had changed his mind. I should know, I guess. It’s hard to keep up with the number of U-turns the Tories have made in recent years. If there’s one thing Sunak does better than condescension, it’s hypocrisy.
Nor was he left out much from the opposition benches. The SNP’s Westminster leader, Stephen Flynn, got into the act. When was the last time the billionaire prime minister had a bill he couldn’t pay? What was a bill, Sunak asked. Chris Bryant observed that Sunak had been in charge of the economy for more than three years and everything had gotten worse on his watch.
Alison McGovern wanted to know what Rish! would if it failed to achieve its goal of “downgrading a pledge to a priority” of cutting inflation in half. Commit hara-kiri? Nothing so honorable. “Uh…nothing.” Everyone breathed a sigh of relief when this PMQ was over. By any standards, it had been completely unmemorable. Except as another sign that Sunak was out of his depth. The Tories had only elected him because he had promised basic competition. And he can’t even handle it.
The sense of futility continued with a pressing question about the impending collapse of Thames Water. Then again, it could hardly be otherwise, as Thérèse Coffey had thrown in an illness: does she really do any work as environment secretary? – and had sent Rebecca Pow.
Pow is an interesting psychological case study. Even his psychiatrist can’t decide if he’s a really stupid person trying to be smart. Or a very smart person trying to be stupid. Or even if she’s human. No one can tell because it appears to be powered by beta AI from the 1980s.
“Water is what makes life possible on this planet,” he began. Really. It was as if Pow had chosen to look up water on Wikipedia just to make sure he knew what he was talking about. Or to prove he didn’t. And she is the minister of water. He also wanted to point out that things couldn’t be all bad because the water companies had borrowed more than £60 billion. She didn’t seem to know that almost all of this went through shareholder dividends.
Shadow environment secretary Jim McMahon gently signaled that all could not be well. The water companies couldn’t fix the leaks, were pumping sewage into the rivers, were still broke and planned to raise prices by 40%. What part of this did Pow fail to achieve? All. Most of our beaches were perfectly fine. No one had ever died from swimming in shit.
A few conservatives had stayed behind to support Pow. Their caretakers, possibly. We lived in a space-time continuum different from the rest of the country. One where the government was not in free fall. Wasting his own time. Just for the hell of it. Wasn’t the problem that there wasn’t enough regulation from the regulators?
So who was going to regulate Ofwat? Take a bow at WatTheFuck.
