As others have pointed
out, the Piers Morgan interview with Rishi Sunak a couple of days ago wasn’t
exactly the pinnacle of journalism in the twenty-first century. Or at any other
time, past, present or future. Somehow, however, it managed to tell us a few
things about Rishi Sunak.
That he’s an inveterate
liar we already knew, but denying
that he's a betting man when he’s previously told us about his discovery of the
joys of spread-betting on cricket was never going to work. Even worse - while he was
doing his spread-betting he was also working on his day job as a hedge fund
trader – which means that his paid job was, quite literally, to spend the day
gambling. Just for good measure, that previous interview which he assumed
everyone would have forgotten about also tells us that he sees nothing
particularly strange about doing his personal gambling in office hours using
office IT whilst he’s actually being paid to gamble for someone else.
His inability to
avoid the trap which the self-styled ‘journalist’ laid for him is also telling.
There are many things he could have said to avoid sealing the bet with a
handshake – if he was going to try the ‘not-a-betting-man’ line, that was the
time to do it, not after the event. His predecessor but one would probably have
looked
for a convenient fridge at that point, but Sunak couldn’t even manage that.
He’s probably just become too accustomed to being bullied into things by his
own party: faced with another bully, he just caved in.
Underlying all of
this are real people, vulnerable people, being treated like pawns in a game by
two men utterly lacking in empathy and understanding, for whom the odd £1,000
here or there is nothing. And in that sense, the interview was an outstanding
success. It showed us exactly who and what Sunak and today’s Tory Party are –
and that was the objective, wasn’t it?
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