Belatedly attempting to invest Rishi Sunak with a personality is proving easier said than done for his image makers.
They’ve now been reduced to making the same mistake Gordon Brown’s advisers made when they planted the improbable idea in the public consciousness that the former prime minister was a fan of the Sheffield pop group the Arctic Monkeys.
At least Brown, however, never attempted to sing any of their songs. Sunak, by contrast, gave a rendition of a Vanilla Ice anthem called Ice Ice Baby from the 1990s – belting out the words “stop, collaborate and listen” – when he was interviewed by Tim Shipman for the Sunday Times.
“If Rishi is a Vanilla Ice fan, this is the first I’ve heard of it,” one weary Treasury official tells me. “Trust me, he just isn’t the sort of man who bursts spontaneously into song.”
Brown admitted in his memoirs he was “ill-advised” to have made himself out to be an Arctic Monkeys fan and said the headlines it generated were a “PR disaster” and he was really – in common with most members of his generation – a Beatles fan.
Ironically, Robert Van Winkle, the American rapper known professionally as Vanilla Ice, got into trouble himself when he stated he was of Choctaw heritage, but genealogists found out that was nonsense. He, too, said he had been ill-advised.
Rishi proves to be a PR disaster, again
His image makers are trying, and failing, to invent him a personality
