Consider the struggle of a modern statesman such as Rishi Sunak, forced to segue from fibbing about a meat tax and state-mandated carpooling to flying to the Middle East and saying something for the ages. In not altogether unanticipated scenes, the prime minister hasn’t managed it.
For all Sunak’s studied earnestness, he has become a figure that no one serious can quite take seriously. We live in an era where politicians have cannibalised their own gravitas for cheap thrills and pyrrhic wins. I know generals are always fighting the last war, but that’s quite hard to respect when it was “the war on motorists”. The culture wars are the only conflict where you actively want the veterans to end up homeless.
Not a problem for the super-rich PM, of course, for whom the stakes always feel weirdly low at both the best and worst of times. Sunak could never be a character in a TV drama; how could the audience be expected to care? Back when it emerged that he was the chancellor who couldn’t make his own wife care enough to pay him tax, it looked as if Rishi’s tilt at the top job might be over. Insiders briefed that if Sunak did judge that to be the case, he wasn’t the type to hang around in Westminster politics and would just go off to California. I’m sure we’re all frightfully sorry to have detained him in public service, particularly given how unequal he is to the many crises gripping the country he was not elected to lead.
And that’s before you even begin on the crises gripping the world, many of which are beginning to interlock or cascade. In a quote that may enter the annals of age-defining complacency, Joe Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, announced three weeks ago: “The Middle East region is quieter today than it has been in two decades.” Our government presumably thought much the same, given that on that very same day, Sunak was honking about “slamming the brakes on the war on motorists”. The UK no longer has a foreign office minister dedicated to the Middle East, and its diplomatic influence in the region has diminished out of neglect and misdirection.
Yet shit events happen (Harold Macmillan), and in light of the ones we are currently witnessing, we might cringe deeply at Sunak’s apparent recent desire to go all-out for a Victoria Cross in the culture wars and expect to be thanked for his service. The excruciating tone shift almost puts you in mind of Boris Johnson, who swept to power on the oven-ready slogan “Get Brexit done” – meaning he was, unfortunately, the man in charge when serious disaster struck in the form of Covid. Johnson’s approach to that deadly crisis was to only lightly repurpose his shtick into the equivalent of “Get Covid done”. This had predictable and predicted results, and is currently the subject of a full-scale public inquiry.
The trouble with the short-termism of the committed culture warrior is that the music always stops at some point. It’s not clear that any of the impressive and effective statesmen of yesteryear – and indeed yesterwar – laid the ground for their success by leaning into whatever quarter-arsed schmuck-bait they thought might have scraped them a towering 495-vote majority in Uxbridge. Indeed, the strategy might be classified as micro-termist rather than short-termist, given the bag of tricks doesn’t seem to have worked in either Tamworth or Mid-Bedfordshire, both of which byelections the Conservatives lost to Labour on Thursday, in seats that would once have been regarded as having unassailable Tory majorities.
Sunak understandably preferred the world stage as opposed to either of those counts, though his turn on it looks poignantly unconvincing. Stature-wise, you can’t help feeling he would have been more appropriately situated at the Tamworth count, secretly cursing the quality of the coffee in a sports hall at 4am, while a seat formerly held by one of his party’s many accused gropers falls – the safest seat ever to be lost by a government, and the second-highest swing in byelection history. It says a lot about the Sunak era so far that I am half expecting a Conservative to blame the results on Putin’s invasion of motoring, or woke boats.
It must be said that much of this headline-frotting circus has been enabled over the past few years by the pundit class, among which I obviously count myself. Trade specialist, epidemiologist, Russian military analyst … Logically, I know the next term in this sequence is Middle East expert, but I do find the absurdism of personally making that leap somehow beyond me.
Congrats to those who have heroically updated their CVs, though, even if I can’t help feeling that fighting on X all day about Israel-Palestine amounts less to advancing your cause than it does to working for Elon Musk for free. (Surely simply not doing it would be preferable? This isn’t some version of that cartoon joke about capitalism, where a peasant guy is going “We should improve society somewhat,” and a smartarse guy is going “Yet you participate in society. Curious!”) The best way for social media firms to make money is for people to get angry, because then they stay longer on the platforms. On those terms, at least, Musk is having a very good war.
Rishi Sunak isn’t, either in his domestic battles or on the international stage. During the first Conservative leadership contest of last summer (words that tell their own story), Sunak described himself as “a serious candidate for serious times”. I guess he was half right. The times are certainly serious – but it’s looking rather too late for the candidate.
Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
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