“Would you do a job as a care worker for £18,000 a year?” asks Laura Kuenssberg. Rishi Sunak replies, “The job I’m doing is making a difference to the country as prime minister.” Where to even begin with this? For many years, I have been privileged to come across numerous care workers in a variety of circumstances. All, without exception, are paid poverty pay and in my experience all do an incredible job. Taking care of desperately ill and disabled people, as well as those with conditions such as Parkinson’s and dementia. Sometimes, more than sometimes, I wonder how people do it, so dispiriting as it can be. And there is nothing glamorous about it. More a calling, a vocation. Of course, people work for the money but I always felt there was much more to it than that.
I’m not surprised at Sunak’s tin-eared reply to Kuenssberg’s question because tin-eared is what Sunak does, it’s what he is. In the same interview, he dodged a question about whether he uses a private GP service rather than an NHS one he is allowing to be run into the ground. If the answer was no, then he’d have said so, so rather than admit to being a near billionaire who knows nothing about the struggles of ordinary working people, he lapses into slippery politician mode.
Does all this really matter? Is it wrong that we have a prime minister worth circa £750 million who is presiding over increased levels of poverty and the unnecessary deaths of hundreds of people in chronically understaffed and over-busy hospitals? It shouldn’t, but it does. If Sunak was a deeply compassionate man who worked night and day to alleviate poverty and improve the lives of the lower orders, then it wouldn’t matter at all. But Sunak is not that man. He’s the PM who boasted to Tory party members that he was deliberately reallocating money away from the poor to give to the better off.
I don’t think Sunak will be PM for long, so feel free to screenshot this blog and use it to shame me when Sunak wins the 2029 general election to serve a third term as PM. My feeling is that by the summer, with the UK falling apart and the Conservative party miles adrift in the polls, desperate Tories will look to bring back Boris Johnson to Downing Street. Let’s be clear about this: Tory MPs won’t be concerned about the country in free fall as much as they will be about saving their seats. If they see the liar and law-breaker Boris Johnson as their only chance at winning in 2024, well, just watch.
Either way, Sunak is not the answer. His advisors have told him to dump controversial and largely irrelevant policies like flogging of Channel Four, which take time for no obvious reward and stick with simple slogans, like these:
- Reduce inflation, which is going to go down no thanks to him
- Growing the economy
- Cutting NHS waiting lists (you know, the ones that didn’t exist until the Tory party won in 2010)
- Reducing debt
- Drowning foreign people in the English Channel
You won’t hear him talk about much else, mainly because his fractious MPs will tear him to shreds if he dares do anything remotely different. Add to the above, sticking the middle finger to Europe and you have the basis of the next Tory manifesto.
No, Sunak wouldn’t do a care worker’s job for £18,000 because no self-respecting multimillionaire could put in a swimming pool and a full-equipped gym next to his own mansion for peanuts like that. £18,000 a year is for the little people who provide dignity to those who would otherwise be cast to the wind.
I don’t hate Sunak. What’s the point of that? He’s an obscenely wealthy man, who married into billions and whose entire life has been handed to him on a shiny golden plate. That’s hardly his fault but by the same token he can’t then tell those with nothing that nothing is good enough for them.
