O brave new world! An hour before Rishi Sunak’s speech, I went to get my pass. “You haven’t been given one,” I was told by the Tory press office. I couldn’t even use a colleague’s. It was me they didn’t want. Me and my luxury beliefs. Then things got truly wild. The Telegraph’s sketch writer was also banned. Not for the first time this week, the Conservative party conference had disappeared through the looking glass.
Then redemption. After half an hour of ridicule on Twitter, the Tories changed their mind. When they had said I wasn’t welcome, what they really meant was that they were desperate for me to come. Even Rish! is into dialectics these days. He couldn’t wait for me. No one could imagine how I’d ever thought otherwise. There were even plenty of empty seats in the media section for me. Whoever would have guessed?
On to the stage strode Penny Mordaunt. To give the 750 or so party faithful a quick lift before Sunak put them to sleep. “This is the turning point,” she told them. She would have waved her sword of destiny if she had remembered to bring it. The last 13 years had built up to this moment. The Tories had deliberately driven the country into the ground. So now the Conservatives were the only party who could rescue us all from the Conservatives. Penny knew we were on track because we were at our lowest ebb. It was time for the Tories to stand up and fight. Each other. So far, so deranged. Michael Gove might not be the only one to be out of his head.
Even Johnny Mercer didn’t know why he had been allocated a five-minute slot, so we quickly moved on to a surprise appearance from Akshata Murty, Sunak’s wife. Pure saccharine. Cringe. She just wanted the world to love Rish! as much as she did. If she had to think of one word to describe her husband, it was … Go for it, Akshata! Try Rich!
She didn’t. Instead, she ignored the word cloud and chose “aspiration”. He had clawed his way up from nowhere to marry a billionaire, and he wanted everyone else to do the same. Good luck with that. And what had really attracted her to him was the way he was so selfless. He just couldn’t stop giving. Give, give, give. That’s why he had gone into politics. Because he wanted to make the world a better place for the little people. Having first made his fortune as a hedge fund apparatchik for Goldman Sachs. Everyone needs a safety net. Not quite as entertaining as an intro from one of Boris Johnson’s lovers.
Enter the Rishster. The Rishmeister. This was his big moment. The last chance saloon. Shit or bust for the Great Reset. Make that bust. The Tory brand is screwed. No one trusts them any more. So all that Rish! has left to sell is himself. And that’s just not enough. Because there’s nothing really to him. He’s the ultimate two-dimensional wealthy technocrat. He has no vision. Let alone one that he’s capable of selling. And the Manchester crowd were never his people anyway. They voted for Liz Truss. They believed in her stupidity. Her insanity.
What was needed was some passion. To persuade people to suspend their natural cynicism. To get them to believe the unbelievable. If only for an hour. But that’s beyond him. Sunak may be a slight improvement on the Maybot but he’s still very much AI in development. RishGPT. He just sounds awkward. Detached. Words tumble out in more or less the right order but they are drained of emotional intelligence. He’s bet the house on himself and he can’t even connect with himself. He merely sounds patronising. Condescending. Listening to him speak is an ordeal.
RishGPT started with the usual off-the-peg personal guff. Yawn. Son of a GP and a pharmacist. He liked to treat others as he would like to be treated himself. Presumably that means he likes being abused by Suella, given legionella and deported to Rwanda. Each to his own.
Then we moved on to his self-invented ideology. Politics was broken. Who broke it I wonder? Another Tory politician who is in denial about his party’s past. And his part in it. Sunak was Johnson’s chancellor and never registered any disquiet. But he would do things differently now. He was an agent of change. An unelected one. Even his party members didn’t want him. Welcome to the new world. Same as the old world.
“Listen,” he said. A few people still may have been. RishGPT was not afraid to make the difficult long-term decisions. Which just happened to be the only way he could imagine reaching the short-term goal of avoiding annihilation at the next general election. He had decided the best way of reaching net zero targets was by getting rid of net zero targets. That’s climate change sorted. Making the difficult decision that it didn’t really matter. Life was too short.
Which brought us on to HS2. Another long-term decision he’d been too frightened to mention for the last week in case his conference descended into even more chaos. But don’t worry, Manchester and the north. As a special treat he was announcing several transport infrastructure projects that had already been announced. Including a Nottingham ring road that went from Dover to London. And if none of this actually ever got built then no harm done. The north would be no worse off than it was now and he’d be long since off to Santa Monica. The UK could go fuck itself.
There was time for a gratuitous swipe at trans issues – this got the biggest cheer of the day – before RishGPT declared a smoking ban. He knew this wouldn’t go down well with the libertarian right, so he was going to make sure people could still die early by abolishing Ulez. Oh, and there would also be some education reforms that would never happen, so no need to worry about that either.
All this took more than an hour. And it felt like it. Even ignoring the fact that much of it was clinically delusional, it was all a bit dull. There was no spark of hope. The Tories clapped politely. But with little enthusiasm. They had come hoping for a miracle. That their lurch to the far right was a political masterstroke. Now they could see the future and it wasn’t pretty. Oblivion would be a release. Sunak had pressed the reset button. And found himself back precisely where he had started.
Depraved New World by John Crace (Guardian Faber, £16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, pre-order your copy and save 15% at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
