May I introduce you to Rishi Sunak. You may have heard of him. Together with his wife, he’s worth circa £700 million, he owns four homes, including a townhouse in London, a pile in Yorkshire with his own gym and pool and a luxury apartment in Los Angeles. Oh, and he’s our prime minister who nobody elected. And he’s mad, as in angry, but why?
At PMQs today, Labour leader Keir Starmer raised the small matter of the 140,000 children who are going to be homeless this year. He read a case study about 11 year old Liam Walker who had written a letter to Santa wanting his old toys out of storage and for his family “to be happy again.” What, asked Starmer, could Sunak say to him? This is what Sunak said:
“If he really cared about building homes, when there was an opportunity in this House – in this House! – to back our plans to reform defective EU laws, to unlock 100,000 new homes, what did he do? What did he do? He went in front of the cameras and said one thing and came in here and blocked it! Typical shameless opportunism!” The photograph at the top of this blog was Sunak’s expression as he gave his answer. Even an old cynic like me was shocked, genuinely shocked. Sunak has a majority of 56 in the Commons. Starmer couldn’t block anything, even if he wanted to.
Liam is a real person. The story about him is a real story. What he said was genuine, not some kind of party political broadcast. And above all, he wanted his family to be happy again. How did Sunak react? By losing his temper and going off on an anti-EU rant, which even the dimmest Brexiteer would recognise as utter nonsense. The thing is this: Sunak doesn’t get it.
Our PM – well, not mine, but you get the drift – has never wanted for anything. An elite private education? Tick A privileged place at Oxford? Tick. A stroll into the lucrative world of Hedge funds? Tick. Marrying the near billionaire daughter of an Indian multibillionaire? Tick. Some very rich people can show genuine empathy for those with nothing or little more than nothing and they make genuine efforts to take action to do so. Rishi Sunak is not one of those people.
He is all the things I mentioned, as well as being an habitual liar, but he has one overarching failing. He is very bad at politics. Not for him a genuine response to Liam’s miserable life, but an unhinged rant. It’s not a good look, is it? A pampered near billionaire who would rather try to score cheap political points than give a constructive reply to Liam and the 140,000 homeless children. A bad politician and what’s more a very bad bloke. Yet PMQs was to get even worse.
For his final question, Starmer urged the House of Commons to come together and enjoy a “happy and peaceful New Year“. Sunak was having none of it.
“We’ve delivered tax cuts for millions of working families! Boosted the national minimum wage! Recruited 50,000 more nurses! 20,000 more police officers! Improved our schools! We’ve cut the cost of net zero for those working families! We’ve cut the boat crossings by a third and we’ve halved inflation!”
Quite apart from the outright lies, what was Sunak on about? A “happy and peaceful New Year”? He doesn’t care about that. This is politics and if Liam could just stopped whining on about being homeless, life would be so much better and give Sunak some peaceful time in which to decide which of his four homes he would be staying at this Christmas.
Britain will be a better place when and if Rishi Sunak’s loathsome Tories are bundled out of office and Sunak himself has fucked off to California for good.
I was going to write that it is hard to believe a prime minister could be so out of touch with the public, but with Sunak it is easy to imagine because that is what he is. He doesn’t feel empathy because he doesn’t have any. A man who doesn’t know how to make a card payment, how to use a hammer properly; a tech bro who doesn’t know how to save his What’s App messages.
I see ‘Liam’ every week at our food bank, or his parents at the very least. They don’t want much, just the ability to live in their own house, to be able to afford to eat. Sunak doesn’t give a toss about them but soon we will have the chance to say we don’t give a toss about him. Let’s take it before he wrecks this country completely.
