It's been a rough week for Rishi Sunak - probably the roughest of his short time in Downing Street.
On Monday, the Prime Minister looked painfully weak as he ducked out of a House of Commons vote to confirm the Privileges Committee's findings that his old boss, Boris Johnson, had repeatedly misled parliament over lockdown parties in Downing Street.
It was a damaging episode for Sunak, but much worse was to come. On Tuesday the news broke that despite predictions of a slowdown, inflation - the change in prices for good and services in the country - had remained at 8.7% with core inflation actually increasing to 7.1%.
Earlier this month the under-pressure PM had vowed that it will be 'on him' if inflation isn't halved by the end of the year - a pledge he made as one of his core promises at the start of 2023.
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Sunak's painful week got predictably worse on Thursday when the Bank of England, in bid to try and get control of the rampant inflation dogging the nation's economy, raised interest rates for the 13th time in a row. The base rate now stands at 5%, heaping more misery on homeowners.
The Prime Minister knows the political price he will pay for the economic turmoil the UK finds itself in, but as an extremely wealthy man, those impacts are unlikely to put him in personal peril. Those problems are reserved for the rest of us.
The government will point to the war in Ukraine and the aftershocks of the pandemic as its explanations for the mess we are in - and will conveniently forget to mention the continued damage Brexit is having on our economy or the catastrophe caused by Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng during their calamitous few weeks in charge last Autumn.
But in reality, raging prices and painful mortgage payments are just the latest bouts of misery inflicted on a nation that now feels broken from every angle after thirteen long years of Conservative rule.
A remarkable statistic from the Office of National Statistics last week told us that in the UK, real average weekly earnings are the same today as they were in 2005. For context, this was the year X Factor star Shayne Ward held the Christmas number one slot with his fairly forgettable ditty That's My Goal.
For people of my generation this was a bleak bit of data, but one that rang very true. I did not leave university until five years after 2005, meaning that my entire working life has been dogged by stagnant wages and total government policy failure.
As well as getting poorer, those of us unlucky enough to have lived through the last 13 years have also had to witness the complete dismantling of our precious public services.
Whichever way you look now it feels like the country is fundamentally broken.
Whether its the systematic mismanagement of our public transport networks that mean it is now impossible for people to reliably get to work between Liverpool and Manchester each day.
Or our creaking healthcare systems, which leaves people struggling to see their GP or facing enormous waits for emergency care in our understaffed hospitals. Meanwhile our stretched social care providers simply don't have the capacity to get medically fit people out of hospital beds and into their facilities.
Then there are our battered local councils that have now been hollowed out to such a dramatic extent that they can barely offer the most basic services that communities rely on anymore. It goes without saying that it is the areas with most deprivation and need that have seen the biggest cuts.
And what about our precious natural waterways that are now so clogged with sewage that tourists are being warned not to enter. There were few more striking symbols of the desperate state of our nation than the leader of Blackpool Council telling people they can come down to the town's beach but not to 'have a paddle' because it the water was rife with untreated waste.
I was fortunate enough to visit Copenhagen in Denmark last year. It was a brilliant break in a city brimming with public services and well cared for facilities. The city is dominated by a network of superb cycle lanes, allowing anyone to safely cycle to work. There are clean and working public toilets on every street corners (when was the last time you saw such a site in the UK?) and rather than avoiding excrement-filled water, the Danes are invited to take a refreshing plunge in perfectly maintained lidos.
This feels a long way away from Wallasey in Wirral where more than 147 days' worth of raw sewage was dumped last year.
Denmark is just one example of a country that takes pride in its public services. If anyone has ever been to Germany, they will have been able to use, cheap, efficient and effective public transport in any major town or city. It doesn't even seem fair to compare this with Northern England's embarrassing excuse for a rail network.
With all this in mind, it was pertinent that this week's disastrous economic news dovetailed with shameless performances from the architects of austerity at the Covid Inquiry.
During their time in Downing Street, David Cameron and George Osborne relentlessly argued that cutting back public spending would lead to economic growth. Instead they oversaw the aforementioned period of remarkable stagnation as well as a huge rise in foodbanks, massive NHS waiting lists and a drastic homelessness and housing crisis. They created these crises and left our under-resourced public institutions unable to deal with the fallout.
Cameron and Osborne created a country in which nothing works, in which no one expects anything to work and in which people are bereft of hope and opportunity.
Having butchered what we do have, Cameron's botched Brexit gamble left the country poorer and separated us from a European Union that for so long had offered lifeline funding to communities left behind by their own government.
Osborne's deluded suggestion to the committee this week that austerity may have actually helped to prepare the UK for the covid pandemic was a masterclass in audacity and gaslighting. This is a man who clearly feels no responsibility for the havoc and misery he unleashed on the nation.
Cameron and Osborne can offer whatever revisionist version of history they like but it won't wash. The problem they have is that the evidence of their policy disasters is now everywhere to see. It's there in our broken public services, in our flatlining economy and on a public who feel desperate and hopeless.
The Conservatives have broken this country and we are all paying the price.
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