It’s been almost exactly a year since a handful of Tory MPs shuffled Rishi Sunak into Downing Street. The good news for Sunak? He’s still there. Just about. The bad news? He’s still there. Just about.
The amnesty is over. After a 12-month omerta, Tory backbenchers are once more free to fire off letters of no confidence to the chairman of the 1922 Committee. And there are rumours that up to 25 MPs have already done so.
There is no great love for Rish! either in the country at large or within the Conservative party. He was brought in with low expectations – the competent technocrat who wouldn’t screw things up even more – and he hasn’t even met them. Almost everyone feels worse off than they did a year ago. Britain feels like it’s broken. Nothing really works.
Labour’s lead in the opinion polls has widened to 20 points and shows no sign of shrinking. We’re all just waiting for a merciful release. The general election that will put us all out of our misery. Sunak included. Being that shit at role-playing prime minister can’t be any fun. Especially when you know the only reason you’re still in a job is that your party knows its reputation is so trashed there’s no one capable of doing a better job. So Dr Death – the Tories’ very own Inaction Man – just hangs on in suspended animation.
But Sunak is still obliged to go through the motions. To give the illusion the UK has a functioning prime minister and government. So what we now have for the foreseeable future is just performative politics. A meta state. Where Sunak and his colleagues pop up in our consciousness to try to prove they exist. That what they say and do has meaning. That they are not inert flotsam driven by the tidal forces of the parliamentary calendar.
If it’s Wednesday, it must be prime minister’s questions. So either Rish! or an avatar closely resembling him duly appeared on the government frontbench shortly before 12pm. His colleagues barely acknowledged his arrival. This was just another half-hour endurance test for all concerned.
Unlike last week, Keir Starmer chose not to use his six questions on the conflict in Israel and Gaza. Mindful not to reopen any wounds within his own party over his insistence on remaining in lockstep with Sunak and not calling for a humanitarian ceasefire, he instead played to the home gallery by merely calling out Tory failures and reminding Rish! of his existential futility. At times like this, Sunak must wonder whatever possessed him to give up the hedge fund life in California. There’s always next year, I guess.
The Labour leader started by welcoming the winners of last week’s two byelections to their places in the Commons. What happened next stunned everyone. Sunak actually made a joke. A good one. Probably the only time in his entire life RishGPT has made an entire room laugh. He observed that the new MP for Mid Beds would offer him more support than the last one: Nadine Dorries.
Funny. But also painfully tragi-comic. Because it was almost certainly true. What’s more, it would also have been true for at least 150 other Tory constituencies. Because now all that’s left to Sunak is to lurch ever further to the right and fight culture wars. All of which lead to a political dead end. There is no way back from this. And tragically, he doesn’t even look as if he really believes half of it.
Starmer carried on punching the bruise. The Tory candidate in Tamworth had told voters they could fuck off if they were hard up. Was this official government policy? And could the prime minister call a general election so the rest of us could have a chance to tell the Conservatives to fuck off?
“Everything is going brilliantly,” Sunak mumbled. As usual, we were lucky to have him. He couldn’t understand why the country wasn’t more grateful for everything he had done. Everyone had never had it so good. He had a plan – though he couldn’t tell us what it was – and it was working. And we couldn’t have an election. Because calling an election would be the easy thing to do. Spoilsport. Just do it. Don’t put yourself out on our behalf.
It was left to the SNP and several Labour MPs – including the frontbencher Yasmin Qureshi – to ask for a ceasefire in Israel and Gaza. Not that the Israelis or Hamas are exactly waiting on us to give them a sense of direction. But it would make MPs feel better if everyone was doing the right thing. This was too much for Sunak. The principle that Israel had a right to defend itself was inviolable. No matter how many innocent Palestinians got killed in the process. The only people who would benefit from a ceasefire were Hamas, he claimed. Mmm. Apart from all those who otherwise would have been killed.
He did reluctantly agree to the possibility of a “humanitarian pause”. Though he didn’t sound entirely convinced. Couldn’t the aid convoys just somehow avoid the bombs and rocket fire? Perhaps not. Maybe a 15-minute break to allow aid into Gaza. Assuming anyone agreed to open the crossing points. This logic is unsustainable. You can’t have any kind of peace in the Middle East without a ceasefire. So if you’re serious about a two-state solution, you have to be serious about a ceasefire.
Labour’s Lilian Greenwood raised the awkward question of Sunak’s missing WhatsApp messages. Surely a techbro could access the messages on his phone. Especially as we now knew it wasn’t lost and was working just fine. Er … no, said RishGPT. He had handed over hundreds of messages to the Covid inquiry. Just none of the ones it had actually wanted. Hopefully.
Most Tory MPs just looked on in despair. Those who did speak were generally unhelpful. They’ve long since stopped pretending to support the government in public and are now focused on trying to hold on to their seat. So we got questions on the Environment Agency, housing, renewables and flooding. Thérèse Coffey made a point of looking particularly bored during the flooding one. Nothing to do with her. Why couldn’t everyone leave her alone?
The weirdest intervention came from the Conservative Peter Bottomley. He didn’t have a question. He just wanted it on record that Sunak was a kind man who had always done his best. It sounded like an epitaph. A eulogy even. Chronicle of a death foretold.
Depraved New World by John Crace (Guardian Faber, £16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, pre-order your copy and save 18% at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
