So much for holding your nerve. Rishi Sunak appears to have lost his. He looks beaten. The man who has lived his entire life in a gilded protective cage – Winchester head boy, Oxford, Goldman Sachs, the Tory party – is now powerless to stave off defeat. The real world has finally caught up with him. Or he with it. There are no easy fixes. Only barely managed decline. It’s no longer a question of if he fails. The only game in town is when.
You can sense the despair in Sunak’s body language. His shoulders are hunched. A small man making himself even smaller. His eyes look sunken, half dead. His speech reduced to a tired monotone. His repartee shot to pieces: neither funny nor clever. Deep down, somewhere in the hell that is his subconscious, he knows the game is up.
And so do his backbenchers. Week by week there are more green spaces for prime minister’s questions on the government side of the Commons. His MPs make a point of staying away. Partly because they are desperate to whip up support in their own constituencies as they try to hang on to their seats. But mainly because they can’t bear the stench of Sunak’s failure. Just in case it rubs off on them. Anything not to be reminded of their own sense of transience. Not to say futility.
Somehow, though, the show must go on. So when Rish! can’t invent a reason not to be there – maybe the prime minister of Sweden would appreciate another visit – he is obliged to show his face in parliament. And every time he does, he looks increasingly unconvincing. The carapace of power cracked open, to reveal nothing but need and ambition. No real talent for government. Nor for leading the country. Rather, he is mere human flotsam, helplessly tossed about in the waves of government debt, inflation, interest rates and the cost of living crisis. The bad news just 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 is 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 offence, it’s hard to know where to start. But as Labour is this week trying to position itself as the party of home ownership, he went in on housing. In the Tory party’s leaflets for the Uxbridge byelection, they were against a target of 300,000 new homes a year. Yet that target seemed to be government policy. Could Rish! put everyone out of their misery and tell us which was the real Conservative policy?
He couldn’t. Rish! 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 penthouse flats – but he did know he had built more than Labour. Starmer didn’t have the heart to tell him that was because the Tories had been in power for the last 13 years. Sunak will kick himself when he finds out.
“He’s given up,” Starmer observed. Sunak had retreated into denial. His safe place where he was still fully functional. His claims to be 100% on it proved to be hopelessly wide of the mark. Unless he was talking about on hallucinogens. He’s 100% on those. In fact, he gives the impression of someone close to a psilocybin overdose. His contact with reality the mere touch of a fingertip.
Rish! could only burble something about Labour having changed its mind. He should know, I suppose. It’s hard to keep up with the number of U-turns the Tories have done in the last few years. If there’s one thing Sunak does better than condescension, it’s hypocrisy.
Nor was there much let up from the opposition benches. The SNP’s Westminster leader, Stephen Flynn, went in studs up. 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 got worse on his watch.
Alison McGovern wanted to know what Rish! would do if he didn’t meet his “downgraded from a promise to a priority” target of cutting inflation by half. Commit hara-kiri? Nothing so honourable. “Er … nothing.” Everyone breathed a sign of relief when this PMQs 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 chosen him because he had promised basic competence. And he can’t even manage that.
The sense of pointlessness continued with an urgent question on the imminent collapse of Thames Water. Then, it could hardly be otherwise as Thérèse Coffey had thrown a sickie – does she actually ever do any work as environment secretary? – and had sent Rebecca Pow along instead.
Pow is an interesting psychological case study. Even her shrink can’t decide whether she’s a very stupid person trying to be clever. Or a very clever person trying to be stupid. Or even if she’s human at all. No one can tell because she appears to be powered by 1980s beta AI.
“Water is what makes life possible on this planet,” she began. Seriously. It was as if Pow had chosen to look up water on Wikipedia just to make sure she knew what she was talking about. Or to prove that she didn’t. And she is the water minister. She was also keen to point out that things couldn’t be all bad because the water companies had borrowed more than £60bn. She didn’t seem to know that almost all that went on shareholder dividends.
The shadow environment secretary, Jim McMahon, gently pointed out that everything couldn’t be fine. Water companies couldn’t sort out leaks, pumped sewage into rivers, were still broke and were planning on raising prices by 40%. Which bit of that did Pow not get? All of it. Most of our beaches were perfectly fine. No one had ever died from swimming in shit.
A few Tories had stayed behind to give Pow support. Her carers, possibly. We were living in a different space-time continuum to the rest of the country. One where the government wasn’t in freefall. Wasting its own time. Just for the hell of it. Wasn’t the problem that there wasn’t enough regulation of the regulators?
So who was going to regulate Ofwat? Take a bow OfWatTheFuck.
