Rishi Sunak only has a year left as PM. Is this really all he wants to try to do with it?

King Charles III turns 75 next week. He has therefore had almost three-quarters of a century to ponder what the speech he would give at the first state opening of parliament of his reign might contain. And the one duty required him to read out earlier today was indeed historic – historically poor, historically dull, historically empty.

To call the government’s policy offer for the next year thin gruel would be an injustice to oats. It’s an incoherent grab-bag of policies with very little to do with Conservatism, even less in the way of coherence, and with absolutely nothing to do with the actual problems facing the nation.

The speech opened with a particularly neat insult to the monarch, who – love him or loathe him – is a committed environmentalist, with years of charitable activity and quiet campaigning on green issues. Naturally, then, Rishi Sunak had him read out one of the most substantive (and so of course worst) measures in the speech: allowing oil exploration in the North Sea once again.

What followed was a litany of policies that have been tried before and failed, reheated in the hope that they’ll make a good headline or two. We know “tougher sentences” don’t work because it’s been all we’ve tried on criminal justice for the last two decades, but that hasn’t stopped it being the centrepiece of speech heavy on law and order (itself ironic given the endless legal troubles of Tory MPs).

Banning cigarettes for those currently 14 of younger might actually be a good policy, and a popular one, but it’s hardly Conservative – you can’t help but feel that most of the party’s backbenchers would much rather rail against it as an example of nanny state going too far if a Labour government introduced it.

That nannying tone was quite consistent. Rishi Sunak’s government also wants to pry in people’s bank accounts, presumably in a bid to completely fell what remains of the country’s bureaucracy in endless complaints and appeals when the software inevitably makes thousands of errors.

It might feel like a generation ago, but the last election in 2019 was fought under a manifesto written for Boris Johnson. It is hard to imagine Johnson – with his brighter, buccaneering, Brexit Britain offering freedom and all that – ever offering up most of this stuff.

Anyone looking for a big move or a unifying theme will be disappointed. The big A-Level plan Sunak announced at the Tory conference is impossible to get done in a year. A ban on conversion therapy, which has been promised time and again by new iterations of this government, has gone.

If this is tiring to read, it’s tiring to write. Even thinking about this King’s Speech is to feel all energy leaving your body. The government is so obviously exhausted and so obviously out of ideas that the ennui is contagious.

Behind every bill, every fought-for headline, every mad and cruel new policy – no tents for the homeless, refugees to Rwanda, and on it goes – lies a hidden question: what’s all this for? If, as everyone thinks, Rishi Sunak will only get this one year as prime minister, is this really all he wanted to try to do with it?

And if it is, why is he so determined to stick it out? Just last week Sunak bemoaned that Brits were more likely to cling on to limited job security rather than go out and take entrepreneurial risks in the world of business. And yet here he is, looking all set to cling to his government job for as long as possible, drawing out the pain for another year.

It’s our time he’s wasting, as well as his. The King’s Speech was Sunak’s chance to make a mark, to show he had some role to fill other than cancelling plans for the future and announcing some new focus grouped cruelty every week in a bid to keep a job he seems to have no grasp of whatsoever.

The only time Rishi Sunak has looked like he was enjoying the job of prime minister was when he wasn’t doing it – during his interview with Elon Musk. Why make this painful, Rishi? You’re clearly not enjoying it, and I can promise you – neither is anyone else. To borrow a phrase from David Cameron: “For heaven’s sake man, go!”