Things can only get wetter. The humiliation. Even when Rishi Sunak is totally down on his luck, he can’t buy an even break. This was meant to be his last hurrah. The prime minister’s final act of pomp and circumstance. The lectern outside Downing Street to inform an ungrateful nation that he was calling a general election for 4 July.
Only it wasn’t just raining. It was chucking it down. Soak the Rich. Soak the Rish!. Sunak was determined to front it out. To not give in and miss out on his photo op. But he looked fed up even as he appeared from the front door. Five minutes later he looked thoroughly miserable. Borderline catatonic. His suit drenched, his speech in rags. And all the while Steve Bray played Labour’s 1997 election theme song, D:Ream’s Things Can Only Get Better, at full volume.
Call it an admission of defeat. The moment that Rish! realised he had run out of road. All hope gone. It wasn’t meant to have been this way. Only good things had ever happened to him up till now. The boy in the gilded cage on whom success and wealth had been endlessly bestowed. Being prime minister was supposed to come easy to him.
For 18 months Sunak had been hoping against hope. Praying for a miracle. If only he believed hard enough he could turn things around. But on Wednesday he realised the game was up. There was no cavalry coming to the rescue. Wishing it could not make it true.
He had planned to wait till November but now it just seemed pointless. With his luck the country would be in an even worse state by then than it was now. Even the IMF thought there would be no room for tax cuts in the autumn. All he could offer was more pain. So he’d get out while he was still young. He had no real friends here. Certainly none among his MPs. The rest of the summer in Santa Monica lay ahead. California Dreaming.
Rish! peered towards the cameras through the sheeting rain. The optics couldn’t have been worse. A desperate man for desperate times. Cosmic synergy. He started by reminiscing about the Covid years. How he had single-handedly saved the entire country. Yes, and some gratitude would be nice.
He seemed to think Covid had been a happier time for everyone. When everyone had pitched in together. Apart from Lady Mone. Sunak seemed to have forgotten that tens of thousands of people had lost loved ones. That this had been a time of great unhappiness for many people.
“I would never leave you alone in your darkest hour,” he said. Though he seemed happy enough in a despairing kind of way to leave us now. For he was about to kickstart his farewell tour in politics. He would disappear with little trace. A prime minister of almost no significance. To be a footnote in the history books. Alongside Liz Truss.
Sunak came to the bit where someone had written: “Try to look a little bit cheerful.” But he couldn’t even manage a hint of a smile. This was a speech to be endured through gritted teeth. It’s not every day a prime minister gets to broadcast his own death knell.
The economy. Hey, that wasn’t as bad as everyone had feared. I mean, borrowing might be at near record levels but inflation was down to 2% which meant we were all getting more and more broke a little more slowly. Rish! had never quite got his head around the fact that prices didn’t go down when inflation did. But this was a prime minister that delivered for the people. That’s why he was proud to say that his was the first government to have lowered living standards over the course of the parliament.
“My plan is working,” he mumbled. No attempt made to keep the disbelief out of his voice. To think that we’re going to hear this rubbish on repeat for the next six weeks. His plan is working very well. For him. His family have racked up another £120m over the last year. Enough to make him richer than the king. But perhaps not so well for the rest of us. Maybe we should all have tried a bit harder. As should he. He’s kept only one of his five promises. And that was with no help from him.
Then the scary bit of the speech. The world was completely fucked. We were all going to die. And all Rish! asked was to be allowed to carry on for another five years. Or less, if civilisation as we knew it ended before that. This was just weird. Sunak had taken no interest in global security until he discovered it last week for his seventh relaunch. So if everything was that terrible, why hadn’t he done something about it before?
Now Rish! was just desperate to get to the end. To get indoors, out of the rain and the cold. It was all he could do not to shiver. To burst into tears. All pretence at coherence had been long abandoned. Because after telling us how dangerous the world was, he tried to persuade us that everything was amazing. We were stopping the boats. No, we weren’t. There are far more than last year. People were going to Rwanda for extended holidays. Someone, talk him down.
We limped to the end. Labour had no plan, he said. Well, that’s odd. Because anyone with a memory could have sworn Keir Starmer had launched his pledge cards only a week ago. And the Tories had taken them so seriously that they had sent out a press release with some fictitious costings for them. Not for the first time over the last two years, Labour have been way ahead of the Tories. And not just in the polls.
But then we have long since slipped through the looking-glass. Sunak is an unwitting truth-teller. Guilty of the failings he describes in his opponents. He ground to a halt. The rain had won. He turned his back to go inside and the country felt a mixture of indifference and relief. Indifference to Rish!’s exit, relief that we were to be put out of our misery.
Moments later Starmer appeared on TV bathed in two union jacks. This was his time. The waiting was over. He was ready. We were ready. Bring it on. Meanwhile, in another corner of London, Paula Vennells couldn’t believe her luck. Her worst day at the Post Office inquiry had just been erased from the public consciousness. Much like her memory.
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