On Tuesday, Grant Shapps managed to remove Boris Johnson from a photo taken in an aircraft hangar. No surprise there. Rishi Sunak has been doing his best to eradicate Boris from the Tory party. And The Convict has been working night and day to destroy any evidence of his involvement at parties during lockdown. What goes around, comes around.
Come Wednesday, the nimble Shapps had airbrushed himself out of prime minister’s questions to hotfoot it to the Middle East. After taking the heat for the government’s pointless new strike laws in the Commons the day before, he reckoned he was due some R&R. Time to distance himself from the scene of the crime. Maybe return in a week or two when the strikes had been resolved. Or not.
If only Rish! could have done the same. He must have come to hate his weekly appearance before the Commons by now. There just isn’t a good story for him to tell. No hope. Just a sorry tale of a country in decline. Not even a managed decline at that. We now appear to be in a tail-spin. Heading for the ground at maximum velocity. Nothing works. The transport system is in chaos. The health service is in crisis. Not a good news story in sight. And somehow Sunak has to keep smiling and pretend everything is going swimmingly.
It’s a shit hand. Even Johnson, with his mendacious boosterism, would struggle to spin his way out of it. But Rish! is increasingly a sitting duck. A not very able politician failing at high-stakes politics. Sinking ever further into the mud. Soon, all that will be visible of him will be a head and an arm. Not waving but drowning.
To be fair, he’s doing his best. And on Wednesday, he was near to the top of his game. But his best isn’t nearly good enough. His backbenchers did their best to cheer him on. Willing him to succeed. But it’s like cheering on the back-marker who has already fallen and unseated its rider. They know it. More importantly, Rish! knows it. Even when his MPs lapse into over-theatrical cheers, he barely acknowledges them. There is no rapport. No connection. He’s from another world. Lost in his own private hell.
Things got off to a rough start with Labour’s Cat Smith asking how long he had had to wait for an NHS dentist. In the past, Sunak has refused to engage with any details of his own healthcare. Not for public consumption. Now he chose to fess up. After a fashion. He was now registered with an NHS doctor. Wow! Man of the people! The Messiah come down to live among us. He didn’t say when he had registered. Or if he had ever bothered to use the NHS service. So much simpler to make a quick call – and get through – and use your credit card. Once he had learned to use it. This tapping out was a bit modern.
Rish! went on. Yes. He had used ‘independent’ healthcare. He couldn’t bring himself to use the word ‘private’. So vulgar. Again, the details were kept deliberately vague. Was he still using private medicine? Would he use private medicine at some point in the future? More questions than answers. He ended by saying that he was proud to have come from an NHS family.
Er … yes. But would his NHS family be proud of what he has done to the NHS? Would his mum and dad be thrilled that he had gone to war with the health unions when the service was falling apart and there were more than 1,000 excess deaths a week? Perhaps not.
Keir Starmer kept on punching the bruise. When he had clapped the nurses, he had meant it. Sunak wanted to sack them. In the 13 years of Labour government between 1997 and 2010 there had been no strikes. The NHS had prospered. Nor was Covid “the get out” escape clause Sunak wanted it to be. In the 10 years between 2010 and 2020 when no one had heard of Covid …
“Or you,” cried Tory backbencher Jonathan Gullis.
For some reason, this reduced some Conservative MPs to hysterics. No one could explain why. It wasn’t that funny. It certainly wasn’t that clever. So no one had heard of Starmer. Nor had they heard of Sunak. Or Gullis. The ultimate no-mark.
Yeah, but … Rish! tried desperately to recover the high ground. Failing, failing, failing. Er, Labour were just too close to the unions. Not exactly the killer line, given most people in the country are on the side of the nurses and the ambulance drivers. Does the prime minister somehow believe there is some moral purpose in refusing to negotiate with the nurses and prolonging the strikes? It certainly looks that way.
And another thing, said Sunak. Labour must be trying to kill patients by not supporting the government’s anti-strike legislation. All right then. In which case, Sunak’s own impact assessment must be on a death mission. Because it concluded the laws would be a disaster and more likely to cause more strikes. And it wasn’t as if the health service was any safer on days when NHS staff weren’t taking industrial action.
Sunak went for the wind up. Waiting lists were now less than two years. Wow! Thanks for nothing. Not something really to boast about. “Labour has run out of other people’s money,” he concluded. Brilliant. The Tories actually wasted billions on unusable PPE. And then there was Liz Truss, who singlehandedly burned through about £45bn in seven weeks and increased everyone’s mortgages. In the same period, Labour hasn’t spent a penny. One day, it might dawn on the Tories that they have been in government for the past 13 years and have no one to blame but themselves.
The rest of the session was something of an anticlimax. Theresa May looked slightly awkward when the Scottish National party leader, Stephen Flynn, brought up former Tory leaders coining it on the lecture circuit when nurses were going to food banks. And Matt Hancock, wearing his trademark lucky pink tie, asked if the Tory party should get a medal for taking the whip away from the already suspended Andrew Bridgen for his anti-vax tweet. The wonder is how Bridgen ever became an MP in the first place. Takes all sorts.
Rish! skated over this one. His own record on lockdowns doesn’t really bear scrutiny. Though right now he’s got rather more to think about. He scuttled away from the chamber. Not to be seen again until the same time next week. If he was lucky. The submarine PM.
