It’s getting to be a habit. The Tories are spinning through their Rolodex of possible leaders like it’s going out of style. Hoping against hope that they eventually come up with someone who isn’t a sociopathic narcissist and can be relied on not to crash the economy.
Competence is now a distant dream for all of us. All we can aspire to is someone who looks the part and is vaguely plausible. Someone who is bound to fail. But will fail in a more acceptable, establishment way. A failure who will make most people poorer but won’t frighten the financial markets. The right kind of disaster. The acceptable face of uncompassionate Conservatism.
Step forward Rishi Sunak. The next-in-line pretender. The third prime minister in as many months. The first person of colour to get the top job. Also the richest. A man who makes the royal family look hard up. A prime minister who, as chancellor under the Convict, helped tip the economy into crisis. Who cut universal credit. The Tories’ very own Anthem for Doomed Youth.
First though, it was time for Liz Truss to say her farewells. Under the circumstances, you might have thought she’d have preferred to sneak away under cover of darkness. After all, her time in office hadn’t exactly been a triumph. Unless you were a hedge fund manager who’d cleaned up by shorting the pound. But no. Librium Liz was hellbent on going down fighting. Even going so far as to do so in her least preferred medium: speech. She’d have been better doing it via interpretive dance.
It was, though, one of her better speeches, in that the sentences made sense on their own. And she more or less obeyed the rules of punctuation. At times she even managed to get the emphasis on the right words. Close your eyes and you could almost have mistaken her for a human. A big improvement on her usual artificial stupidity. But it was still delusional. The last act of someone who hadn’t quite realised the war was over. And that she had lost.
Mostly, Librium Liz just wanted to pay tribute to herself. For the many things she had got right. For “all my time as prime minister”. Er … that was 50 days. First she congratulated herself for having managed the mourning period for the Queen so well. She made it sound as if the Queen had deliberately waited until Liz had got to Downing Street before deciding it was time to die. Boris Johnson just couldn’t be trusted to give her a proper send-off.
Then it was on to other achievements. She wanted to quote the Roman philosopher Seneca. Or Seneeka, as she chose to call him. It didn’t sound as if Seneca was Librium Liz’s usual bedtime reading. Then again, Boris had quoted the Roman statesman Cincinnatus in his leaving speech. So maybe she thought it was something she was obliged to do.
Anyway. As Seneeka said, “I was right and all you bastards were all wrong. You’ll never take me alive”. Truss had no regrets. No urge to say sorry for having caused such chaos. For having devalued the pound and put hundreds on people’s mortgages and household bills. None of that had really happened. Not that she was one to hold grudges. So she wished Rishi well in his own efforts to crash the economy. Sayonara, motherfuckers.
Truss wandered off to the waiting car with her husband and two daughters to go to the palace. The entire Truss family looked delighted to be seeing the back of No 10. The past seven weeks had just been a mirage. It had never happened. Now they could resume their lives.
As the cars pulled away, the maintenance men removed Truss’s “lucky” Jenga lectern. And out came a smaller one.
Rish! emerged on his own. No kids. No wife. But Larry the cat sauntered down the pavement to remind Sunak just who was the real boss around here. He had seen off countless prime ministers and was backing himself to outlast the latest muppet. Rish! flicked out a heel, trying to strike Larry a glancing blow. Larry avoided it with ease.
Don’t smile. Serious face. Don’t look like you’re gloating. Keep the MP acolytes away. You’ve got to look like you’re above party factions. Above all of them. These were the thoughts racing through Sunak’s mind as he approached the lectern. Then he opened his mouth and spoke like a Goldman Sachs executive giving a PowerPoint presentation. The plutocrat turned technocrat.
Sunak paid lip service to Johnson and Truss. They had been fun, worthwhile experiments. But now was the time to be serious. Remember not to smile, you halfwit. Mistakes had been made, he said. He forgot to add that many of them had been made by him while he was chancellor. But everyone was an amnesiac these days. Half the country couldn’t even remember the last prime minister, and she’d only been gone less than two hours.
He would take advantage of Brexit. Making a 4% cut in GDP work for the country. There would be difficult decisions to come. That would be tax rises and spending cuts, then. Still, he would try to make sure it was the least well-off who were the most badly hit. He spoke about national unity, but he would be hard pushed to take even half his own party with him. The only thing holding the Tories together was the fear of an existential wipeout.
Having promised to serve faithfully – every prime minister always says that and always lets you down – Rish! waved awkwardly by the door before going inside No 10. There he got on with the reshuffle and allowed himself a smile. Now he could settle some scores. Sadly he couldn’t get rid of Jeremy Hunt. Much as he would like to. There was only room for one privileged smooth talker in his cabinet.
Jacob Rees-Mogg and Simon Clarke jumped before they were pushed. So it wasn’t all bad. But Dominic Raab to justice? He had screwed up there big time before. Suella Braverman at the Home Office? Another disaster waiting to happen. And she had just been sacked for breaking the ministerial code. Underneath Sunak’s inclusive facade lies just another rightwing nutter. The Tories can rest happy.
