Buy shares in gun turrets, because Suella Braverman has made landfall in Washington to offer her esteemed take on the 1951 UN refugee convention. As a former practitioner in the field of … hang on, let me get my magnifying glass … planning law, the home secretary will regard herself as vastly superior to any of the legal minds who collaborated on the multilateral postwar treaty – as well as far better suited to rocking a “Suella 4 Leader” T-shirt at any future pledge drive/torchlit pitchfork procession. In the strict interests of appropriate venues, the United States has never actually ratified the convention – but that’s not important, because the home secretary obviously thinks one of its soft-wingnut thinktanks will serve as a cool backdrop. Think of her trip as the international equivalent of one of those primary school visits that a campaigning politician uses to announce a new weapons contract or crackdown on sex offenders. It’s top-flight politics: this is just how we do it.
Back at home, meanwhile, things feel less full of promise for Suella’s beleaguered line manager. The prime minister’s handlers seem to have alighted on a plan that some summarise as “let Rishi be Rishi” – a strategy that assumes Rishi Sunak has a personality other than “billionaire dweeb with a govern-like-no-one’s-watching decal on his kitchen wall”. Nonetheless, breaking the glass on this timeworn phrase formulation does perhaps indicate we have reached a particular stage of the game. As with “let Truss be Truss”, “let Boris be Boris” and even “let Gordon be Gordon”, this exhortation tends to come late in the political day. It always feels like a nice way of saying that the individual in question is terminally inadequate, but that all options for disguising this have now been exhausted.
Still, what does Rishi being Rishi look like? Instructed to buy a character off the peg, the PM seems to have decided his defining trait is long-termism. And in order to show his frustration with short-termism, Sunak has hit on the galaxy-brain idea of rowing drastically back on two long-term projects. Both HS2 and net zero targets now seem destined for one of Sunak’s seven bins – a hint that he hasn’t taken the country’s rejection of his party in the opinion polls too well. The net zero U-turn in particular suggests our spurned hero is at the stage of buying sulphuric acid and going to the country with the slogan “If I can’t have you, no one can.”
In fact, next month’s Conservative party conference will be held under a banner reading “Long-term decisions for a brighter future” – a slogan so tedious that I can only read up to the word “decisions” before having to break off and stare defeatedly out of a window for an hour. Somewhat awkwardly, the aforementioned party conference will take place in Manchester, meaning that Sunak is currently having to pretend that that bit of the HS2 line might still happen. Then as soon as he is back in London, he can effectively reveal he was just being polite. As I say: this is top-flight politics. It’s how we do it.
Yes, as things are mooted, the long-planned, hugely expensive London-to-Manchester HS2 line will go to neither London nor Manchester – a genuine feat of infrastructural dadaism that should receive some kind of global recognition. This may well be the most embarrassing British folly since Watkin’s Tower, a late-19th-century attempt to build a tower in Wembley Park that was almost an exact rip-off of the Eiffel Tower, except 150 feet higher. Only the bottom layer was ever built, before it was discovered that the foundations were unsteady and the builder went bust. It was eventually brought down in a controlled explosion.
In fairness to Sunak, the over-budget, under-managed horror show into which HS2 has thus far descended isn’t really his fault – but it is arguably a bit of a pisser for a man who only last week decided to lay out what he felt was British people’s major gripe about our politics. “They feel that much gets promised, but not enough is delivered.” We really are through the looking glass if cancelling some more delivery is the answer. Despite having correctly diagnosed the problem, Sunak comes across as a sort of robo-carer, whose display reads, “We’re doing everything we can.” The impression is of an administration that has stopped trying to fix problems and is now trying to convince people that they need to live with them. It’s palliative politics, giving the tacit impression that the best the UK can be offered is a sort of end-of-country care.
Of course, an even less appealing option is available, and as Rishi lets himself be Rishi, we are – almost incredibly – starting to see sightings of it in the wild. Last week, following the net zero announcement, Tory MP Chris Skidmore refused to rule out submitting a no-confidence letter, while another former minister told the Guardian: “There is a sense [Sunak] can’t win an election. People are thinking about that and increasingly irritated. In November his 12 months are up, and it only takes 15% to call a no-confidence vote … ” Surely, surely not – and I do mean that. Even so, the most realistic short- and medium-term advice you can offer to anyone hoping to hear much less from Suella Braverman is … get used to disappointment.
Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
