LAST UPDATE | 4 Jul
SOMEHOW, RISHI SUNAK is getting through his public appearances without visibly shaking. Perhaps he’s in denial about the polls. Or maybe the pharmacist’s son has simply been drugged.
Standing for photos with people on the campaign trail, he has come across a little like one of those anaesthetised tigers that tourists pose with in Thailand. If the forecasts are to be believed, the Tories and the tigers will soon both be endangered species.
Some of his MPs haven’t even bothered to stand this time around. Others have defected to the Labour Party. The scale of their predicted defeat is so grave that even big-name cabinet ministers could soon be updating their LinkedIn profiles.
While Keir Starmer has been joined at the stump by party colleagues eager to bask in a rising sense of excitement, Sunak has largely been left to go at it alone. That may well be his own decision. Many of his MPs have become so toxic to the brand that he’d be better off getting pictured next to a scarecrow made of asbestos.
Presumably, someone has given Liz Truss a colouring book with some crayons and asked her to stay at home.
Without a compelling story to tell voters about his party’s record in government, his speeches have largely resorted to scare tactics instead. The world, he tells us, is more dangerous now than it’s been since the end of the Cold War. He’s right, of course, but part of the reason for this is that the UK continues to export arms to countries like Saudi Arabia and Israel. A British Prime Minister complaining that the world is dangerous is like Harvey Weinstein complaining that Hollywood is sleazy. Yes, it is – you made it that way.
Grasping at thin air for anything resembling a vision for the future, Sunak has even proposed bringing back National Service. To be fair, National Service is surprisingly popular with older people, who apparently believe that the problem with young people today is that they spend too much time on their phones and not enough time committing war crimes in the Middle East.
If appealing to the ‘grey’ vote was Sunak’s Plan A, it makes his decision to leave the D-Day 80th anniversary commemoration all the more incomprehensible. While other European leaders lined up to pay homage to the last survivors of the Normandy landing, the Tory leader played truant. To understand how offensive this was to his party’s core demographic, imagine if an Irish Taoiseach left a 1916 commemoration early to play cricket on the grave of Padraig Pearse.
For all his faults, at least Boris Johnson could read a room. He would never have messed up such a ripe opportunity for jingoistic show-boating so close to a general election. Johnson would have arrived at the D-Day event in a Union Jack hot-air balloon, kissed the veterans wetly on their calloused mouths, and then fired a rock launcher vaguely in the direction of Berlin.
The general feeling here is that Sunak cannot appeal to ordinary people because he fundamentally misunderstands them and what they are going through. His claim to have gone without Sky TV as a child in an ITV interview was especially artless — this is a country where three in ten children live in poverty, after all. The richest UK premier ever elected, his personal fortune grew by £2.2 million last year alone.
Like a foppish Gallic monarch, it’s possible that Sunak is so out of touch that he can’t understand why people are so angry at him. He’s publicly stated that he still expects to be Prime Minister tomorrow. John Major said the same thing in 1997, but we now know his wife had been quietly moving their possessions out of Number 10 in the days and weeks prior to her husband’s electoral wipe-out.
The question this morning is not whether the Tories will lose, but how badly they will lose. There is speculation now that they could come third to the Liberal Democrats. The Liberal Party know what this feels like – they won their last majority in 1906 before eventually being pushed out by the insurgent Labour Party against a backdrop of in-fighting, worker strikes and world war. Sound familiar?
This morning will be my second time voting in a British general election. In the five years since the Tories eviscerated Jeremy Corbyn, I’ve seen friends lose their jobs, emigrate due to Brexit, languish on NHS waiting lists, and even get evicted from their homes by unscrupulous landlords. There is a sense, more than ever, that politics really matters.
It remains to be seen what Starmer does with the weight of this expectation. The problems facing the new government are enormous and his critics on the right question his appetite for radical change. Almost intentionally boring, his looming landslide will be met by a sigh of relief rather than a chorus of cheers. Even if all he has to offer is competency and fairness, then his premiership will feel like a warm shower after 14 years of walking in the rain.
Peter Flanagan is an Irish comedian and writer. You can find him on Twitter @peterflanagan and Instagram @peterflanagancomedy.
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