I just love this tweet from our Culture secretary Nadine Dorries:
My first thought was, “Nothing’s too good for the workers” until I remembered that contrary to his public image Brand Rishi Sunak has been afforded the advantages in life only great wealth can buy you. The US Green Card holder married to the tax dodging daughter of a billionaire, who herself is worth circa £700m, knows a thing or two about wealth, but does it really matter than he is wearing Prada shoes (whatever they are) worth £450 and a £3500 “bespoke suit”, when former republican, Lib Dem and ardent Remainer Mary O’Leary – sorry, she calls herself Liz Truss these days – wears £4.50 earrings from Claire’s Accessories? It certainly seems to matter to Dorries.
Certainly, Brand Rishi’s suit cost rather more than my own – something like £3450 more to be precise – and I’ve never spent anything close to £100 on shoes (trainers in my case: I don’t do shoes) but hey, if you’ve got it, flaunt it, I guess. Except that we now know that the man whose brand wants to run our country has been somewhat less than straightforward with how his great wealth came about. I honestly don’t care if people have shedloads of money, especially if they’ve worked hard for it and they pay their fair share of taxes, even politicians. Which is where Dorries’s tweet comes in.
The implication of the tweet is that Sunak is an out-of-touch super-rich boy whereas Betty – sorry, Liz – Truss is a down-to-earth commoner from buys stuff on the cheap, the same Betty who splashed a mere £500,000 of taxpayers’ money on a private flight to Australia. Of course, Brand Rishi IS an out-of-touch super-rich boy but Truss is an out-of-touch quarterwit.
Sunak’s great wealth matters for a number of reasons. In theory, I have no problems with a very rich person being PM. As long as she or he does a good job, it doesn’t much matter, but when they are slippery, like Sunak, then it does. And why? Because Brand Rishi is the openly austere candidate, the right wing Thatcherite who is far right wing than Thatcher (even though in this contest against Betty, he’s seen as the more left wing option). He will be the one to slash public services, to continue to overtax the low paid, the one who broke the pensions triple-lock, presided over a huge rise in inflation and did far too little to compensate folk against spiralling utility prices. In other words, a slippery politician who has been less than honest about his own wealth will attack – I think attack is definitely the right word – the lower orders. Yet it isn’t a Labour politician who attacks Brand Rishi: it’s a senior Tory.
The Tory party has thrown-up, very much in the vomit category, two of the worst possibly prime ministerial candidates who are at each other like rats in a sack. If either of them understand the lives that ordinary people live, they’re not talking about it. I’m not sure either of them would recognise a working class person if they pissed down his (or her) leg.
