It reeked of desperation. There again, Rishi Sunak has a lot to be desperate about. Two weeks into the election campaign and there’s no shift in the opinion polls. If anything, they are getting worse for the Tories.
So the prime minister has reached the point where any old lie will do. Not bothered if it all falls apart the next day. Anything to grab a headline in the rightwing press. Fooling some of the people some of the time is now as good as it gets for Rish!.
Sunak used to pride himself on being Mr Integrity. A politician you could rely on to tell the difficult truths. That Sunak has long since been discarded and his credibility is on the line after an increasingly unattractive display from the prime minister in Tuesday’s televised debate saw him at his tetchiest, constantly talking over Keir Starmer and the host, Julie Etchingham.
Maybe Rish! thought his luck was in as Starmer took half an hour to engage with his accusations that Labour had planned £2,000 tax rises on every family. But even when Keir did wake up from his comatose start, Sunak kept up the attack. These were tax rises that had been verified independently by civil servants working in the Treasury, he said. Again and again. He even sounded as if he believed it. Mostly because he needed to. He feeds off scraps these days.
Nor is Rish! too bothered about who he takes down with him. Any collateral damage is a price worth paying in the futile endeavour of trying to stay in power. He has long since stopped thinking of his cabinet ministers as people. They have been reduced to pawns in a losing game. Apparatchik automata sent out to destroy their own reputations as well as his.
The energy secretary, Claire Coutinho, must have been devastated to find out she was the chosen lamb to the slaughter for Wednesday’s media round. Of all the days to have been given. Obliged to indulge in the fantastical. To celebrate the magnificence of all things Rish!. The man who could do no wrong.
In fairness, there is no real malice to Claire. She isn’t a Michael Gove-like character. Then there isn’t very much of anything to Claire. Her rise through the Tory ranks has been shrouded in mystery. The kindest explanation is that she isn’t as unpleasant as her peers.
Though neither is there any discernible ability. Her synapses are so few, you can hear them rattle. Departmental questions are an ordeal for her and everyone else. It’s like watching a car crash. She does, though, have the loyalty of a particularly dim pet. If Rish! has told her that Rish! is brilliant, who is she to argue?
Shortly before 8am, Coutinho was talking to the BBC’s Justin Webb on the Today programme. The only real topic of conversation was the £2,000 tax lie. Claire’s limitations quickly came to the fore. Starmer had taken a while to deny the claim, so therefore it must be true.
Please, someone put her out of her misery. A lie does not become true just because someone doesn’t refute it. That’s not how the world works. All it proved was that Keir hadn’t been quite as quick-witted as most of the viewers.
Webb was just getting started. The figures had been cobbled together using dodgy information supplied by Tory spin doctors to make them look as bad as possible.
Not at all, said Nice But Dim Claire. She had been specifically told that Treasury civil servants had decided of their own free will to investigate random Labour policies that they might not even do in their spare time. And had asked the permanent secretary – the top civil servant in the Treasury – to sign their figures off. Something the permanent secretary was more than happy to do as he was intensely relaxed about breaking the civil service code and pissing off his future employers in the Labour party.
“The thing is,” said Claire, failing to realise she was dying on her feet, “if anything, everyone had fallen over backwards to portray the figures in the best possible light.” As you do. If anything, the £2,000 was an underestimation. So what was the real figure? Coutinho hummed. Maybe twenty ten thousand.
Justin also pointed out that the £2,000 was spread over four years – something Sunak hadn’t mentioned. Ah, yes. But a leap year came every four years, so it was like a year really. It was like dealing with a halfwit.
Coutinho went on to praise Jeremy Hunt for his brilliant handling of the economy – something no one said ever; Jezza is the least serious chancellor in living memory – before getting confused as to whether energy bills would be going up in the autumn. They would, but somehow they wouldn’t. Yeah but no but yeah but no. Something tells me that is the last time Claire ever appears on the Today programme. A relief for all of us. But her in particular.
But her ordeal was not quite over. There was still an appearance on Good Morning Britain, by which time a letter to Labour by the permanent secretary, James Bowler, had been leaked, saying his staff had been forced to do the costings under duress based on dodgy data, that the figures were totally unreliable and that he had never signed them off. In short, Sunak had lied through his teeth. And forced Coutinho to do the same.
Coutinho’s response was to pretend nothing had happened. The letter wasn’t a letter. It was a mirage. Bowler hadn’t known what he was writing. He had been unwell. Just because everyone in the Treasury disowned it and the working assumptions were all made up, it didn’t mean the £2,000 figure wasn’t entirely accurate. I’d hate to see the state of her family finances.
Yet again Sunak had proved himself to be the politician who can’t do politics. By telling one of the most egregious lies in any election live on TV, he has made himself vulnerable for the remaining four weeks of the campaign. The first question will always be: “Are you a liar?”
To which the only answer is yes. His honesty is now up for grabs. His reputation little better than Boris Johnson’s.
For his part, Rish! has temporarily abandoned the campaign for the D-day commemorations. He read out Montgomery’s address to the troops from 80 years ago about sacrifice and service. Something Sunak knows little about. If war broke out, you couldn’t imagine Rish! being in the first wave of the Normandy landings. He’d be at home on his computer betting on a crash in the German stock exchange. Keeping it real.
