He didn’t put it in
quite those terms, of course, but he might just as well have done so. The
reduced number of Tory MPs left after the election earlier this month means
that more
than 40% of them now have shadow minister responsibilities, and the group
is so short of talent, in Sunak’s eyes at least, that some of them have been
given two or even three shadow jobs. It's a pretty damning indictment of the
nearly 60% who have not been given jobs at all.
In his last-ditch
attempt to ensure the success of Project Oblivion, the PM has apparently been
sending out hourly
tweets making increasingly fantastical claims about what Labour will do if
they win, including the abolition of exams, the demolition of the green belt,
and taxing people for driving their cars. About the only things he hasn’t so
far accused Starmer of planning are the abolition of democracy and the
installation of Starmer as PM for life. Which is something of a pity, because
it takes much less deliberate misinterpretation of Starmer’s words to conclude
that he wants to do both of those things.
Yesterday, Starmer
told us that the UK will not rejoin the EU in his lifetime, one of the few
definitive pledges he’s managed to give in a somewhat lacklustre campaign. Since
no government can bind its successors, the only way he can deliver on that pledge
is to remain in office until he dies. That, in turn, obviously means the
abolition of democracy. It’s a silly extrapolation of a silly statement, of
course – but no sillier than much of what Sunak has been saying about Labour’s
plans.
But there is a real
point here about democracy, and it doesn’t just apply to Starmer; it equally
applies to Sunak (or whoever succeeds him as party leader). Ruling things out
categorically clearly implies that public opinion has no role or place in
decision-making. And nor is it just about the EU. Both parties have repeatedly
made it clear for example that even if the SNP were to win every seat in
Scotland on a manifesto pledging an independence referendum they would ‘never’
allow such a referendum to be held. They’ve gone further as well – they have
claimed that a defeat for the SNP in today’s election, an outcome which is
possible according to the polls, will kill the idea of independence for ever,
as though those who argue for it have no right to continue promoting their
views after a single electoral setback. It is a profoundly anti-democratic
stance to take.
Whether the issue is
the EU or Scottish independence, or whatever else, it is reasonable to suggest
that the decision shouldn’t be revisited by an annual referendum, and to
debate, in that case, how long is a reasonable period before re-assessing
public opinion. It is not reasonable, and not the act of any democrat, to argue
that it doesn’t matter what the public think (nor, in the case of Scotland,
whether they vote for parties supporting such a proposition) and that the
decision can and will be made by the PM of the day. It serves to underline how
strongly both the main English parties are wedded to the idea of absolute
sovereignty being vested in the crown-in-parliament rather than in the people. On
the basis that you can’t abolish what you don’t have, they don’t really need to
propose the abolition of democracy.
In the last two days
before voting starts, Sunak has obviously decided that his Tory Oblivion Project
needs yet another boost. The lies became even more fantastic and a whiff
of antisemitism was deployed. Whilst the project received something of a
setback with the Nigel Farage plc Party coming close to an implosion over
racism and admiration for Putin, Sunak hadn’t yet played all his cards. Fresh
from reminding
us of the disaster which was Liz Truss, yesterday it was finally time to roll
out her
predecessor as another reminder of just how chaotic the last few years have
been and how dishonest his party can be. That Johnson seems to have declined to
be pictured with, let alone shake hands with, the current incumbent was a
beautiful bonus.
But with the latest
poll showing the Tories still retaining as many as 64 seats, it’s time for
desperate measures if he is to get down to less than 50 and be certain of
losing his own seat. Today, in a final roll of the dice, he’s let the dogs off
the leash. First up in admitting that defeat on a huge scale is inevitable was Suella
Braverman, who somewhat strangely seems to believe that making the wipeout
even greater will aid her chances of becoming leader. But then, most of what
she believes seems a little strange. She was rapidly followed by the ever-dependable
poodle Mel
Stride, always guaranteed to present the picture his leader wants
presented. Just how many other outgoing cabinet ministers will be loyal enough
to their leader to step up to the plate and concede defeat before the polls
open tomorrow is as yet unclear. Perhaps Sunak has another card or two in the
pack that he can play if they don’t, but it’s not obvious what they might be,
and he’s leaving it very late. On the final day of the campaign, the success of
the TOP is still on a knife-edge.
There’s no doubt
that the little scandal about betting on the date of the election has provided
a significant boost for Sunak’s Project Oblivion. Whilst many – including some
in his own party – criticised him for dragging things out before taking any
action, that’s because they don’t understand the objective. Delaying action, leading
to repeated headlines over two weeks, can only have assisted in the fulfilment
of his project. He claims to have been incredibly angry about the whole saga,
but chances are that the part which upset him most was a Labour candidate
getting in on the act. After all, the Tory majority in that seat last time
round was a little over 20,000, so in the context of the 2024 election it wasn’t
even a marginal. It was a racing certainty that Labour would win, further
reducing the total in the Tory column. In a blow to his project, Sunak now has
to face the probability that the Tories might even hold the seat. Worse,
tarring Labour with the same brush runs the risk that the Tories might hold on
to a few other seats as well.
It wasn’t quite the
same scandal as that besetting the Tories; rather than using insider knowledge,
this Labour candidate was betting on the outcome of an event in which he had at
least a degree of agency. The extent to which he chose to campaign or not
campaign could, in theory, affect the chances of him winning, even if victory
looked inevitable to everyone else regardless of what he did. It’s not easy for
a Labour candidate in 2024 to lose an election in which he starts only 20,000
votes behind. Paradoxically, Starmer’s quick action against him has probably
helped him to lose the election – and win the bet. In electoral terms, it’s a
sort of lose-lose outcome: neither Sunak nor Starmer gets the result they
wanted in the constituency.
For a few days last
week, Sunak’s Tory Oblivion Project was put on hold as he trotted off to a remote
corner of Italy for a G7 meeting and then headed up to Switzerland
for a meeting on Ukraine. In his absence, there was a serious danger that his
project could stall, but he’s safely back in charge now, and making up for lost
time. Losing
his Campaigns Director to the already simmering betting scandal was a
masterstroke. That should certainly help to ensure that his enemies within the
Tory Party – the whole of the party, basically – don’t have much chance of
derailing his project. It’s made him so “incredibly angry” – in his own words –
that he’s going to do precisely nothing about the two candidates involved (so
far; who knows what else is yet to emerge, given that the bets appear to have
been part of a
much larger surge) until after the election a probe by outside
bodies is completed, despite the fact that a policeman involved was rapidly suspended in an
unusually swift response from the Met. England failing to win a football match
might have been outside his control, but was undoubtedly a lucky boost to his
little project.
Finally this week
came the news for which he has been anxiously waiting: the polling is now so
bad that even
his own seat could fall to the opposition. So far, it’s only one poll, and
others are still showing that he might be put on the spot about his insincere
pledge to serve a full five years, but there’s still almost two weeks left
for the other polls to confirm such an outcome. He needs to get the final total
below 53 seats to be reasonably certain of regaining his own freedom of
movement across the Atlantic, although achieving his true target of zero looks
as though it might still be just beyond his grasp. But there’s an increasing
chance that the next Tory leader will be chosen by putting all – or maybe even
just both – the remaining names in a hat and pulling one out rather than
bothering with an election process. All in all, he’s had a good week. He can
only hope that there are no further international distractions to take him away
from the campaign trail during the limited time remaining.
Last week saw the
publication of manifestos by most of the parties. On the basis of scanning
them, it is clear that amongst his first acts, in the unlikely event of his
being re-elected, Rishi Sunak is clandestinely planning to reintroduce
workhouses, award Vladimir Putin a peerage, and start a war with France. His
manifesto doesn’t say any of that, of course – but neither does it explicitly
rule any of it out. Given that the Tory attack on Labour is now largely reduced
to accusing them of planning a variety of tax rises on the basis that the
Labour manifesto doesn’t explicitly rule them out, why shouldn’t the same approach
be applied to their own manifesto? And why stop at taxes?
Objectively for
those who take the trouble to assess the different party statements, it’s a
pretty stupid and pathetic approach to electioneering, and it smacks of
desperation. But the lesson that they have learnt from Sunak’s predecessor but
one is that making stuff up and repeating it even louder when challenged can
work. The hope is that enough people remember the lie and forget the detailed
rebuttal to swing their votes in the desired direction, particularly if they
really want to believe the lie. (Although why keep these aims secret? Who, among the target audience for the Tories, doesn’t secretly like the idea of a decent war against France? Even
if that audience would probably prefer to take on Germany. Again.)
There are, as the
saying doesn’t quite go, lies, damned lies and political manifestos. The idea
that ‘politicians always lie’ is commonplace, and in the sense that what
governments deliver isn’t quite what their manifestos said they were going to
deliver, it has the ring of truth. And whilst that is sometimes down to lying,
it’s more often a case of exaggeration and wishful thinking – and circumstances
can and do change. But recent years – the Johnson/Trump era stands out as
marking the transition – have changed the nature of political lying. It’s no
longer ‘just’ a case of exaggerated promises, it’s now direct, repeated and deliberate falsification
of objectively provable facts. The ‘alternative facts’ are actively promoted by
partisan print media and grossly inflated by the echo chambers of social media.
The BBC have a reasonably good fact-checking service, but in their caution they
struggle to be as blunt in their assessment of lies as they could be – and even
after demonstrating the untruth of any given statement, they seem quite happy
to invite the liars back to repeat the same lies again the following day.
There was an attempt
in the Senedd recently, led by Plaid, to criminalise lying by politicians. It
was somewhat droll, to say the least, to see it supported by the Tories, given
that they have been the main culprits in recent years. It probably underlines
the fact, though, that they don’t really believe that the law can successfully
be applied to what they have been doing. I suspect that their assessment of the
probability of such a law being effectively used against a Johnson or a Sunak
is accurate, implying that they want the kudos from being seen to oppose political
lying but without any danger that it would actually restrict them from doing
so. They would hardly have supported it if it really meant that they would no
longer be able to refer to ‘blanket’ 20mph speed limits, for example. It’s a
problem to which there is no simple solution. In an ideal world, the miscreants
would be rewarded with ‘nul points’ when the
votes are counted. Sunak might be doing his best to move his party towards such
a scenario, but he won’t be around for long afterwards (his promise
to serve a full five year term on the opposition benches should be treated as
just another example of the genre) and finding a successor who won’t simply
double down on the same approach is looking like an impossible task. It looks
like a problem with which we’re stuck.
It’s always the
foreigners who mess things up.
Things were going
swimmingly for Rishi Sunak and his project to annihilate his party. He’s always
saying how strong his commitment is to serving the public, and this project,
with all its benefits for future generations, is his way of demonstrating it. His
definition of poverty as the unavailability of Sky television went down
incredibly well with those who already wanted his project to succeed whilst
also helping to move a few waverers across. Giving an aide who is unable to
resist a flutter on political events enough nods and winks to make a decent
stab at the date of the election days before he announced it was almost a
master stroke. Making sure that it was duly drawn to the attention of the
Gambling Commission might have been a little harder, but where there’s a will,
as they say.
And then along comes
a G7 meeting, forcing him to take two days out to swan around one of the most remote
corners of Italy with a bunch of foreigners, creating the danger of a poll
recovery in his absence. Worse still, his new best friend, the Italian PM best
known for her extremist positions on just about everything, insisted on giving
him a huge hug. In front of the cameras too – raising a serious threat that some
of Nigel’s supporters might see him as being worth a vote after all. Fortunately
for Rishi, he’s well blessed with aides and assistants capable of carrying on
his project without him, albeit unintentionally. Grant Shapps, along with Michael
Green, Corinne Stockheath and Sebastian Fox – four for the price of one – did a
sterling job of reminding people just how utterly the Tories are going to be
destroyed in three weeks’ time, although urging people to vote to avoid handing
Labour a supermajority was a bit more of a positive message than he would have
wished. There’s a danger that some might take it seriously.
He’s now itching to
return to the fray. Only another three weeks to remind people, incessantly,
that the next PM will be either him or Starmer, and that a vote for anyone
other than him is a vote to turf him out of put someone else into Downing
Street. Sometimes, the simplest message is all that it takes, and encouraging
people to see it as a simple choice between him and somebody else – anybody,
really – should be enough to finish the job. The hardest part will be finding
enough time to campaign in his own constituency to ensure the right result.
Failure to lose there could condemn him to weeks or even months more in
Westminster when he could be reacquainting himself with his riches in California.
It's a hard life.
Beauty isn’t the
only thing which lies mostly in the eye of the beholder. In generic terms, most
judgements as to what is good, bad or indifferent depend to a large extent on
our own perspective; we all have our own criteria against which we make that
judgement. Take Prime Ministers, for instance. In recent years, the contest for
the title of worst ever Prime Minister has become a crowded field, although there
are people, not all of them currently in therapy, who sincerely believe that
Liz Truss did a brilliant job in the role. Despite the strong competition from
her predecessor, to say nothing of her successor, those making a judgement
based less on fantasy and more on the lived experience of the majority are more
likely to rate her as top contender for that title of ‘worst’. It’s a record
with which it’s hard for Sunak to compete.
It follows that being
regarded as the worst is a race to the bottom that Sunak has probably concluded
that he can’t win, although his recent emulation of the Johnsonian technique of
simply making it up as he goes along has convinced some that he’s still half
trying. But all PMs who can see their time coming to an end start to worry
about their ‘legacy’ – how they will be seen by future generations. As that
reference to future generations suggests, the ‘legacy’ of any PM can only be
properly judged after a suitably lengthy period of time has passed. Maybe Sunak
isn’t aiming for the title of ‘worst’, but the title of ‘best’, and just knows
that it will take time for people to recognise his outstanding contribution, and
identify the correct assessment criteria.
There is still one
thing that he could achieve in his remaining month in the job which history
would view as a huge positive step to have taken, and that is this: the complete
annihilation of the English Conservative and Unionist Party. It would be a
truly stupendous achievement for any leader to take his or her party from overwhelming
electoral dominance to oblivion in just five years, and even if we give his
immediate two predecessors some credit for building the foundations for the
Sunak oblivion project, it’s still a remarkable success story for him in the
mere two years he’s had in charge.
Given that his own
seat is something like the fiftieth safest for his party, losing that one,
leaving him free to push off to California soon after, would also suit his own
personal agenda as well as being a major step towards his own version of net
zero. Some might see this as some sort of failure, but any balanced view of
history is surely more likely to judge it a success. Whether he can actually
drive the dial all the way down to zero is currently an open question, but no-one
can accuse him of not trying. It may take time – not least to ensure that the
beast is well and truly dead, rather than merely resting – but Sunak may yet
end up being credited with the most significant political change in recent UK
history.
The one thing that
stands in the way of him getting the recognition he would deserve for achieving
his mission is that the political gap is likely to be filled by another party
moulded by its own current leader into a carbon copy of what Sunak’s party was
a mere 14 years ago. It would perhaps be unfair for Sunak’s achievement to be
sullied in such a fashion, but when did fairness enter the equation?
One thing that
economists *know* with absolute certainty is that every human will always act
in a way which maximises his or her own financial position. It’s an assumption
which underpins many economic theories – and, by extension, much of government
policy. Applied to politics, and especially (although not exclusively) to conservative
politics, it means that politicians *know* that people will always vote for the
party which offers them the greatest personal financial benefit, regardless of
the effects on others. Whilst some voters might actually tell the pollsters
directly that they think a decent health service is more important than a penny
or two off their taxes, the Tories *know* that those voters are lying, and
that, in the secrecy of the polling booth, they will vote on the basis of personal
benefit. And those who really depend on a public health service for their very
lives aren’t in any of the target groups of voters.
It's what explains
the Tory obsession with tax – whether talking about their own promised cuts or
the other parties’ alleged increases – and why their tax promises are targeted
at precisely those individuals and groups whose votes they are keenest to
attract. They are convinced that recipients of tax cuts will vote for those
implementing them. It also, in a roundabout way, goes at least part of the way
to explaining the otherwise inexplicable decision of the PM to duck out early
from the D-Day commemorations yesterday to do an interview with ITV in which he
was talking about…er… tax. There is, to put it bluntly, no financial benefit to
voters from his attendance at the commemoration, and it is therefore something
which he doesn’t need to be concerned about. He really can’t understand what
the fuss is about, or why others would be concerned – an attitude which shone
through in his initial reaction to criticism, even if some slightly wiser head
has since taken him to one side and drafted a more sincere-sounding apology for
him to put out.
It is alleged
that a firm in which he was a partner was one of those who was betting heavily
against UK banks, and therefore a partial cause of the 2008 banking crisis.
Whilst the extent of his own direct involvement is not entirely clear, the way
in which such funds behaved at the time was a living demonstration of the idea
that some people do pursue their own financial interests, no matter how
damaging that may be to others, or even the country as a whole. It’s also of a
piece with the acceptance of donations
from dubious individuals. Everything is defined in monetary terms – even morality
is subservient to money.
But here’s the
thing. Those economists who *know* that we will all act at all times in our own
best financial interest also know – or at least most of them do – that it’s really
just a working assumption that they use to develop their theories and models.
In the ‘real’ world, humans are complex creatures who don’t always behave as
the models say they should, and those models can only ever give a sort of
approximation to help understand the economic world. It’s a limitation on their
*knowledge* which people like Sunak simply do not and cannot understand. And
end up looking more than a little bemused at what they see as the stupidity of
those who don’t behave as they are supposed to.
Sunak’s claim about
Labour’s tax policy has been widely debunked, and exposed for the silliness
which it is. Whether the next government will actually increase taxes or cut services is
an open question, however – doing neither whilst adhering to a stupid and unnecessary
fiscal rule of their own invention is a logical impossibility, but exactly the
same can be said about the Tories. His claim that he will protect pensioners
from ever paying income tax on their state pension, however, enters a new world
of unreality.
It is a fact that
the default position, as of today, is that an increasing number of pensioners
are going to end up starting to pay income tax on part of their state pension.
That is the result – the inevitable result – of both freezing tax allowances
and increasing the pension. The resulting effective increase in income tax
doesn’t only affect pensioners, it’s just more obvious because the state
pension has long been set at a level below the threshold for income tax. Sunak’s
promise to increase the tax threshold, for pensioners only, to ensure that it always
stays higher than the level of state pension will certainly do what he says –
i.e. ensure that no-one pays tax on their state pension.
But he is
effectively arguing that the best way to protect pensioners from the effects of
Tory policies is to vote Tory. “Vote for me to protect you from me” is a novel – probably unique –
election gambit.
One of the features
of the 2017 election campaign was the way in which Theresa May’s big
announcement on social care turned to dust on exposure to daylight and
scrutiny. And one of the features of politics more generally is that
politicians rarely learn from the mistakes of others, preferring to believe in
their own unique ability. That inability to learn about the dangers of
announcing policies which haven’t been thought through has given us Sunak’s
National Service policy. The policy, which was categorically
ruled out by one of Sunak’s ministers only three days before being
announced as government policy, has been torn
apart for its back-of-the-envelope costings and criticised
by former military commanders as unworkable.
Sunak and his advisers
seem not to have considered the possibility that ministers being interviews might
be asked questions on the policy as opposed to being allowed to spout
meaningless slogans, with the result that they have been sent out unbriefed and
ended up busking with incoherent and inconsistent answers. Putting those
answers together, we now know that the scheme would be compulsory, but with no
means of enforcement for those who choose to ignore it. Any ‘punishment’ for
those declining to participate is expected to be meted
out by employers not giving jobs to young people who can’t demonstrate
their participation, and fast-tracking those who have, whether they can do the
job or not. Curiously, it was only a matter of a week ago that another of Sunak’s
‘loyal’ troops told
businesses to consider people solely on merit and forget all other factors.
Neither position seems to be easy to reconcile with the Tories’ traditional
position that businesses themselves know what’s best for them and should be
allowed to make their own decisions free of political interference.
Still, the good news
is that, uniquely amongst all politicians, Sunak has a plan to which he is
working. Just as well. Imagine how much chaos he could create – in his own
party, never mind for the rest of us – if he didn’t have a plan.
Traditional wisdom
says that oppositions never win elections, it’s just that governments lose
them. It’s not one of those laws of politics that I’ve ever found entirely
convincing, but it’s one which Sunak seems determined to prove does apply, in his
case at least. His latest sure-fire election loser is his half-baked plan for
the reintroduction of National
Service. It’s a compulsory scheme under which 18 year olds can choose
either to spend a year in the armed forces, or to give up one weekend a month
for a year to ‘volunteer’ to do community work. Compulsory volunteering is a concept
which will, of course, be familiar to many former members of the armed forces
(as in “I need three volunteers – you, you and you”), but the ‘compulsory’
part of both elements seems to be optional, since there will apparently be no
sanctions for those who decline to participate. Sunak, who ruled
out conscription just a few short months ago, claims that National Service
isn’t at all the same thing as conscription, and I suppose that if it’s only
optionally compulsory he might have a point, if only in terms of linguistic
niceties.
What’s harder to
fathom out, though, is who exactly he thinks this policy will appeal to. He has
probably calculated that since it doesn’t start until 2025 and only applies to
18 years olds then, those most directly affected haven’t got a vote in this election
anyway. And he’s already lost the votes of most of those young people who are already 18, so
can’t make that much worse. I suppose it might be popular with those who did
their National Service back in the day and feel that the country has gone to
pot since it was abolished, but since the policy ended in 1960, with the last
conscript released in 1963, anyone who actually was conscripted would have to
be at least in their late 70s, and most would be over 80. Demographics tells us
that that is a comparatively small and diminishing cohort. It’s also one of the
few cohorts where a majority reliably vote Tory, meaning that the scope for
winning extra votes is necessarily limited. Returning to the possibility that
there is some sort of cunning plan here to throw the election, it could just be
an attempt to make sure that as many as possible of those MPs who’ve plotted
against him go down as well.
There’s no real need
to worry too much about anything he promises to do over the next six weeks,
given that the probability of him still being around to do it is vanishingly
small, but the bit that concerned me most wasn’t the ‘interesting’ use of words
like ‘compulsory’ and ‘voluntary’, it was the point made in news reports about the
need for cohesiveness. As a Tory spokesperson put
it, “Only by nurturing our shared culture and fostering a sense of duty
can we preserve our nation and values for decades to come”, as Sunak said,
“…to create a shared sense of purpose among our young people and a renewed
sense of pride in our country”, and
in Cleverly’s words,
“The bulk of this is about helping build a cohesive society”. It looks
and sounds a lot like a scheme designed to inculcate a sense of Britishness,
deference and obedience into a reluctant and ungrateful peasantry. And they’re planning to pay
for it by raiding the wholly inadequate fund which was set up to replace EU
funding. That scheme has already been used to redirect funds from poorer area
to richer ones; this proposal would further rob those poorer areas of the funds
they need and were promised in pursuit of an outdated and dangerous form of English/British nationalism which sees any alternative sense of identity as a threat.
Like many idioms and
sayings, the old adage about rats and sinking ships has an underlying truth to
it. Because rats, in the good old days at least, tended to live in the lowest
part of ships, they were often the first to notice an ingress of water and
reacted by running upwards. They are, apparently, accomplished swimmers but
stand a better chance of surviving in the open sea than in the bilge of a boat en route to the bottom, although whether they have the mental
capacity to assess their choices that carefully before running from the
encroaching wet stuff is less certain.
Unsurprisingly, the
Conservative ship – a sinking vessel if ever there was one – is currently
experiencing a rash
of sudden departures as well, as the crew eye the direction that their ship is
taking under current leadership. Today, they’ve been joined by John Redwood,
who entirely coincidentally was once compared to a rat
sandwich by Ieuan Wyn Jones, although some
have suggested that he’s heading for a different universe rather than a watery
grave. He’s long been on a different planet certainly. What is rather less
expected is the way in which Sunak’s party is actively welcoming
other rats back on board, so that they can go down as members of the crew
rather than outcasts and renegades. It’s probably the nearest thing UK politics
has to the presidential pardons which some US leaders issue to their mates
before leaving office. It’s the sort of thing which only a PM on his political deathbed
would consider. He has little reason not to do so, given that the possibility of salvaging anything of his political
reputation took to the lifeboat in despair a long time ago.
It’s probably
inevitable that anyone taking on the job of PM will end up making a number of
decisions which will lead to demands for him or her to apologise. There’s no
reason why Sunak should be any different. I’m not particularly a fan of
demanding apologies from politicians – I’d much prefer that they got things
right or, at worst, did what they could to put things right and avoid repeating
the mistakes. But assuming that we want him to apologise for something, all of
us will probably have our own views as to which is the most important apology
to make. In Sunak’s case, my own first choice would be the ill-fated ‘Eat Out
to Help Out’ scheme during the pandemic. Launched after deliberately not
seeking any expert advice on the probable consequences, there is little doubt amongst
the experts that it led to a significant increase
in cases, which probably led to hundreds of premature
deaths. A reckless and avoidable decision which led to premature deaths,
taken without even seeking expert advice; that, surely, is something for which
an apology is the least that might be expected. It is, though, something which
he continues to defend.
There is one thing
for which he has apologised. His choice
of trainers has apparently caused the bottom to fall out of the market for
a particular brand, which is no longer considered ‘cool’ as a result of being
worn by Sunak. It’s more than possible that he sees damaging the profitability of
a large company as being a bigger sin than overseeing a few hundred early
deaths; it was, after all, his concern for the financial impact of the pandemic
rather than the wellbeing of the populace which led to the ‘Eat Out to Help Out’
scheme. But in saying that his apology was ‘fulsome’ it’s also possible that it
wasn’t really intended as a genuine apology at all. The word has a variety
of connotations, and for many, a ‘fulsome apology’ is actually an insincere
one. Insincerity in a PM – who’d have thought it?
Rishi Sunak
continually refers to the European Court of Human Rights as a “foreign court”,
despite the UK’s honourable role in creating it and writing its rules, and its
equal say in appointing the judges. This week, he was asked why by an SNP MP.
His brief reply
was to say “Because it is based in Strasbourg”. As a statement of fact,
it is unusually honest; as an argument for distancing the UK from it, or even
withdrawing entirely, it’s on the weak side of pathetic. It’s probably
reasonable to assume that he believes that the voters to whom he is trying to
appeal regard the very fact of its being based outside the UK as being
sufficient grounds for having nothing to do with it. And there are certainly a
lot of those dreaded foreigners in Strasbourg.
He might even be
right, but if he is, he’s surely missing a trick here politically. If withdrawing,
or threatening to withdraw, from an international body based in a foreign
country on the grounds of its very foreignness is a vote-winner, there are
plenty of other organisations from which withdrawal might be even more popular.
The one which immediately springs to mind is FIFA. To start with, it’s based in
Zurich, and it would be hard to identify anywhere more closely associated with
internationalism than Switzerland. As everyone (well, everyone in the
Conservative Party, at least) knows, the city is fully of peace-loving leftie
foreigners, some of whom even have the effrontery to be lawyers, and none of
whom can be trusted further than they can be thrown.
On top of that, FIFA
demands that Ingerland use the same rules as everyone else, and even has the
gall to make the Ingerland team play against assorted foreigners in a
tournament, rather than simply being awarded the World Cup in perpetuity as
they are entitled to expect. If half a pledge to withdraw from a court which
merely stops the UK government deporting a handful of people to central Africa
is as popular as he thinks, imagine how popular a pledge to withdraw from FIFA
might be. It would enable Ingerland to choose who they play as well as setting their
own rules: winning could become the norm rather than the exception.
I don’t understand
what’s holding him back. It’s not as if this is any less honest than the Brexit
prospectus, and that worked well for his party at the time. He could even hire
a bus and put a slogan on the side pledging to spend the UK’s (Wales, Scotland and
Northern Ireland would all be instructed to follow Ingerland’s lead, naturally)
contributions to FIFA on the NHS instead. Or even use the simple but meaningless slogan so beloved of Ingerland fans: Football's coming home. It would give him a better chance of saving a few seats than anything else he's tried so far.
According to some
Tories, the best
way of preventing Nigel Farage from getting elected to a seat in parliament
for a five year term is to give him a seat in parliament for life, by sending
him to the institution for sufferers
of Post Imperial Stress Disorder. The logic is curious, but then logic has
long ceased to be their strong point. Others think Farage should be made the
official representative of the UK in Washington. And some of the most desperate
actually want to do both.
It’s true, of
course, that if Trump were to be re-elected in November, he would be quite
keen on the idea of having Farage as the UK ambassador. Doubtless, Farage
would be well-placed to suck up to him on behalf of the UK to form a
close working relationship with him, but supporters of the plan seem to be
rather overlooking the fact that the main job of the ambassador is to represent
the UK in Washington, not the USA in London. Assuming that Labour win the UK
general election sometime between now and November, it seems highly unlikely
that Farage could successfully represent the views of a Labour government, even under a not-so-lite Tory like Starmer. And
even less likely that he’d try. Further, since the objective is to deter Farage
from standing in the UK election, he’d have to be appointed very soon. That in
turn means that, in the meantime, he’d be dealing with the Biden
administration. It really is hard to conceive of a better way to p*ss off
Biden, and damage UK-US relations, than to appoint a cheerleader for his
opponent, an ambassador whose idea of tact and diplomacy invariably involves
the use of the biggest megaphone he can lay his hands on.
On the other hand,
Sunak seems to have given up trying to avoid upsetting anyone other than the
extremists in his own party. Appointing Farage is a suggestion that the Tory high
command have apparently rejected,
but that’s only what they’re saying this week. Given the extent to which consistency
has become an unfamiliar and unwanted virtue in the Tory Party, who knows what they’ll say next week if Reform’s
poll ratings continue to climb? Given the increasing likelihood of some sort of
reverse takeover of the Tories by Reform after the election, keeping on the
right side of the probable next, or next-but-one, leader might even appeal to the
PM, at least until he can escape the nightmare and take up a new and better-paid
job in sunny California.
Offering someone a
direct bribe not to stand in an election is, of course, illegal under electoral
law, but mere legality is, like consistency, another discarded value for what
used to be known as the party of Laura Norder. It’s not an insurmountable
barrier anyway. All they need to do is to present membership of the Lords as a
punishment rather than a reward – and that’s not exactly an unrealistic
assessment. Ennobling Farage might even help to prod Labour into reversing its
previous U-turn on abolition of the Lords: Farage might yet turn out to have
some useful function after all. The thing that still makes it all highly
unlikely, however, is that it would require Sunak to make a decision rather
than prevaricate. So probably not going to happen unless the desperate supporters of this mad proposal depose him in May.
The Labour and Conservative
parties have each had their own little financial scandals in recent weeks. The
Tories have taken £10 million (or perhaps £15 million) from a man who makes
casual racist remarks which he apparently thinks are merely ‘rude’,
whilst Labour’s new leader in Wales took £200,000 from a man twice convicted of
environmental offences. At first sight, there seems to be no comparison – it doesn’t
require more than a very rudimentary command of basic maths to understand that
£15 million is bigger – a lot bigger – than £200,000.
But that comparison
is over-simplistic – we also need to think about the differing electorates
involved here. Hester’s millions were intended to help Sunak appeal to the
entire UK electorate. At 46.6
million, that equates to about 32p per target voter. The donations to
Gething, however, were intended to help him win an internal Labour Party
election. Whilst the party seems to have avoided publishing detailed numbers, some estimates
put the total eligible to vote at around 100,000, meaning that the donation was
worth about £2 per target voter. The egregi-ometer no longer points so unswervingly
in the direction of Sunak and the Tories.
One could attempt to
argue that there is some sort of moral difference between a man with previous
convictions and one who is merely under
police investigation, or even that casual and unthinking racism is in some
way less serious than environmental crime; but they’re not arguments that I’d
like to try making in their position (although that doesn’t mean that they won’t try).
I’m more interested in the similarity of their responses. Both men have
effectively said something along the lines of “I’ve followed all the rules
on donations”. It’s not a statement that I’m in a position to dispute. It
does, though, raise two big questions. The first is whether rules which allow
this sort of behaviour when it comes to political financing are fit for purpose
– and many will probably conclude that they are not. The even bigger question
is whether we are prepared to accept that the only responsibility we place on
politicians is to follow the letter of the law at all times. Should we really
never expect them ever to take a step back and think about morality, and
whether what they are doing complies with some sort of sense of right and wrong?
They are both acting
and talking as though the fuss will soon blow over and this particular scandal
will be laid to rest alongside all the others. The worst part of it is the
horrible feeling that they might be right. Along with Thomas
Jefferson.
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?
What’s in a word? In
one of the most powerful and memorable political speeches of my lifetime –
perhaps of all time – a true giant of politics told
us, “I have a dream”. Today, in perhaps the most forgettable of a series
of eminently unmemorable press conferences, a tetchy and soon-to-be-forgotten politician
told
us, multiple times, “I have a plan”. Articulating the detail of the plan,
beyond putting the entire effort of the government machine into sending a tiny
number of people to Rwanda whether doing so is lawful or not, has, once again,
eluded him. His ‘plan’, such as it is, is so badly flawed that it would never
have passed were it not for the support of those who went to such lengths to
make it clear that they already know that it will fail.
He now fears that
the unelected House of Lords, an institution which has always been known as a
bastion of traditional conservatism which is why the Tory Party has long resisted reform (even if they're not all Conservatives in the party political sense),
might actually act in accordance with those traditional values and defend the
rule of law. The result is that he has been reduced to begging those conservatives
to follow him by ditching all that they have previously believed and
capitulating to the lawless right of his party. He seems blissfully unaware of
the fact that at least some of those ‘loyal’ MPs who did not rebel over the
last two days of debate voted for the final bill with a degree of confidence
that it would be well and truly mauled by their lordships with no need for said
MPs to put their own heads above the parapet. Cowardice comes in many forms.
Yesterday’s events
also revealed that there is a secret weapon which can deter at least some of
the extreme right-wingers who have so successfully cowed Sunak into submission. Giggling.
It seems that one of the self-styled leaders of the revolt backed down at the
last moment because Labour MPs were giggling and taking the mick as the
over-hyped rebellion turned into an impressive demonstration of the willingness
of Tories to vote in favour of that which they had so vigorously opposed just
hours previously. The only question is ‘who’s weapon is it?’. Whilst Starmer’s
ridicule of Sunak earlier in the afternoon proved to be effective against the PM,
Labour’s fit of the giggles seems to have worked to Sunak’s advantage. Perhaps
he should ask Starmer to organise more of the same the next time the certifiable
tendency of his party - a much more accurate description than the rather grandiose and self-important, 'five families' - threatens a revolt.
“How will you pay
for it?” is one of those
standard questions asked of opposition politicians whenever they propose a
different policy to that being pursued by the government. For reasons which
have been discussed here previously, it’s actually a very silly question,
depending on the assumption that government finances are like those of a
household, but it’s a question which is effectively deployed not just by
government politicians, but by supportive – or merely lazy – journalists who
either don’t want or else can’t be bothered to delve more deeply into the
question.
It’s not a question
which has been much asked about the vast amounts of military aid being sent to
Ukraine, despite the fact that none of that aid was ever budgeted for at the
time it started to be sent. It’s not a question which has been much asked about the
strikes on Yemen, where millions of pounds’ worth of ordinance has been
expended on trying to take out a few cheap drones. And whilst ‘the cost’ is
apparently an entirely valid obstacle, in Tory eyes, to expanding the
membership of the Senedd, it’s not an issue which seems even to have been raised about
the
government’s plan to appoint an extra 150 judges to deal with the surge in
immigration cases. Although, interestingly enough, when the Tories told us what
Wales needed more than more politicians, they only referred to "…more doctors, dentists, nurses and
teachers…". No mention of judges there.
Given the backlog of
criminal cases, it’s hard to disagree with the government’s conclusion that we
need more courtrooms and more judges to hear cases, but for those waiting for
cases against those who have burgled or assaulted them, giving priority to the
surge in immigration cases in an attempt to deport a tiny number of people
to Rwanda buy off opponents within the Tory Party may not be a precise
match with their own priorities. It turns out, however, that even if the
government do fund more judges, and even if the processes for recruiting them
can be sped up from the normal glacial pace of such matters, the government have
no power to direct which cases they will hear. That, it seems, is a matter for
the Lady Chief Justice, who takes a
dim view of the government trying to tell her what to do. (On the other
hand, judges taking a dim view of their actions is hardly a new experience for
the current government, for whom abiding by the law is not considered to be
something about which they need to worry themselves unduly.)
Still, it means that
Sunak might actually achieve something he’s always boasting inaccurately about.
If he finds the money, and if the judges are recruited, and if the Lady Chief Justice
deploys them as she sees fit rather than as the government might wish, it might
actually help to reduce the backlog of criminal cases. In which case, Sunak
would, indeed, be acting in line with ‘the priorities of the British people’.
Even if it’s by accident.
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