An email arrives from the Ready4Rish! media team late on Monday afternoon. Would I like to go to Rishi Sunak’s leadership launch at the Queen Elizabeth II conference centre the following morning? Hell, yes. I couldn’t think of anything better. I was Ready 4 Rish!
Only it turned out that Rish! was far from Ready 4 me. An hour or so later, I got a reply. Thanks but no thanks. The venue was already at capacity. Another time. Maybe. Or maybe not.
Several hours later I hear from a colleague on a more Tory-friendly paper that he applied to go long after I sent my email and had been welcomed in with open arms. I wrote back to complain and give Sunak’s media team the chance to reconsider. Instead they doubled down. They didn’t seem bothered they had lied to me about the room being full. I wasn’t invited. End of.
It got worse on the morning of Sunak’s launch. Two sketch writers from other less critical papers were let in on the nod. And they hadn’t even bothered to go through the process of applying. On the inside, the room was crowded but far from at capacity. There was space for plenty more. Including me.
So it was personal. And the frontrunner to be our next prime minister was running scared. Rish! was so thinned-skinned he couldn’t even take a bit of criticism or gentle piss-taking. And at heart was against a free press. So much for the man who claims to love democratic values.
Shortly before Rish!’s event went live, Grant Shapps announced he was abandoning his own campaign – a loss to entertainment if not the country – and would be backing Sunak.
He was greeted with loud whoops by enthusiastic apparatchiks waving Ready4Rish! placards. Sunak kept rather more silent about his endorsement from Norman Lamont. No former chancellor really wants the backing of the architect of Black Wednesday.
There again, you wouldn’t have thought you would want to make a show of having a total psychopath as your right-hand man. But Rish! happily allowed himself to be introduced by the angriest man in politics.
“Vote for Rish! FRIENDS,” Dominic Raab snarled menacingly. If you didn’t, you’d have no one to blame but yourself. And the bodycount could rise exponentially. Rish! had the courage of his convictions, he went on. That’s why he had implemented tax cuts to the tax rises he had recently introduced.
Shortly afterwards, Sunak peeked over the lectern. He wanted to have a grownup conversation. Though not one that might involve anyone talking back at him. This was to be strictly a one-way conversation. About how we had got where we were. A three-year trajectory in which he had no recollection of ever being involved. It’s astonishing how bad the economy has got in the week since he resigned as chancellor. We were doing just fine till Nadhim Zahawi came along.
Then Rish! went for the party loyalist pitch. Boris Johnson had been a great, great leader. So great that Sunak could no longer remember why he had plotted to get rid of The Convict.
It had just been a coincidence that the Ready4Rish! website had been registered back in December. Yes, he had written a resignation letter but that had been just for fun. There were no serious points of disagreement over the direction of government. That had just been a slip of the tongue.
Yes, Boris was a flawed individual, Sunak went on. But then so was everyone. Even him. Hell, which one of us hadn’t lied to everyone we met, had cheated on every woman with whom he had had a relationship and broken every law in sight. Just traditional Tory values.
And he was the man with a plan. Though he couldn’t tell anyone what it was. Other than he would continue to carry on as normal. Because that was obviously all working just fine.
Rish! took a quick question from a Tory councillor – “ I don’t know how to love you. You complete me” – and then a couple more from the media, which he made no effort to answer before scurrying off to count his votes.
Like Rish!, the launch had been slick and vapid. Much ado about nothing. Just the sort of vacuity that could have been designed to please the hollow neediness of Matt Hancock. Within hours he had tweeted his support with a moody, oh-so-sincere video. The Gina look of lurve. The vote they all wanted. The gamechanger. Some men have greatness thrust upon them …
Just down the road on Millbank, Tom Tugendhat was having his own campaign launch. One from which potentially unfriendly journalists weren’t banned. Unlike Rish! he is open to criticism.
Everyone was half expecting Tug to abseil from the ceiling of the four-storey atrium – he’s never worn his military background lightly – but instead he appeared from behind a giant sign saying “Tom”. Like a gameshow host. Polished with freshly cut hair. Tough times call for etc …
Tugendhat has one distinct advantage over all the other leadership contenders. He’s never been in government – indeed he’s often sounded more like the opposition – and is not contaminated by sleaze, incompetence and failure.
Unfortunately, this might not be a positive for Tory MPs who tend only to trust other people’s lies. So his pitch of clean-living dependability, stitched together with plenty of extended military metaphors – did you know he had been in the army? – may have fallen largely on deaf ears.
But Tug did go into a lot of policy detail – he claimed to have discovered a £100bn stash of dead money he was happy to spend: me too – but there was something rather distracted about his performance. Either that it was too rehearsed or that his mind was elsewhere.
He almost committed news by saying an election was essential, before later clarifying that he meant an election of the last two in the contest and then just suddenly drifted away midway through the Q&A. No one could quite believe he had left.
The third launch was the eccentric Kemi Badenoch. Her pitch was that everyone should be allowed to do pretty much as they pleased. Why bother with a police force when people can just go and shoot criminals themselves? And hospitals were just for wishy-washy liberals. Things were much better when people with cancer just shut up and died.
In an ideal world she would burn down the entire country and start again. Her biggest bugbear was the woke warriors. What was wrong with bullying in the workplace and the odd racist joke? Predictably she went down a storm. Michael Gove applauded enthusiastically.
Meanwhile, Liz Truss’s campaign was being derailed even before it had formally started. Liz fancies herself as the new voice of change. Quite why is anyone’s guess. Then she is entitled to be delusional.
She’s never knowingly had an original thought. Which is why she is the natural person to be the Boris continuity candidate. But even she recoiled when Nadine Dorries and Jacob Rees-Mogg endorsed her. The backing nobody wanted.
