Stop! Just stop. Please. No more of the pointless mud-slinging. Could we just call a halt to the ludicrous claims of world-beating achievements in obscure sectors? And please can George Galloway be banished from public view? Immediately.
Already, just days after the Rochdale by-election, this truly obnoxious politician has taken up more time on my radio and television screens than can possibly be healthy.
I don’t deserve this. The country doesn’t deserve this. There are massive problems in need of immediate attention.
We all know what they are: homelessness; NHS waiting lists; food poverty; the need for a hike in support for Ukraine. We all know that the answer is, largely, money, but also more efficient structures. And none of us can be unaware that part of the problem is the UK’s atrocious productivity, because successive administrations have talked about it for decades without achieving any positive improvements.
What we need is an immediate election and a government that can try to get to grips with the myriad problems engulfing the country, not least among them, and perhaps most dangerous, the growing sense of hopelessness that is taking root.
A principled government might concede that avoiding the election until the last possible moment – the end of January next year – would do the UK a great disservice and actually be unlikely to shower rewards on a Tory Party that had stuck it out to the bitter end.
If there were any beneficiary, then one could argue it would be the prime minister for he would, at least, be able to claim a considerably longer life in office than a lettuce: a somewhat dubious achievement but Sunak’s potential boasts will be sorely limited.
But even if the PM is in no hurry to go, the rest of us have had enough. We are at the stage where clamping one’s hands over one’s ears and chanting the outro from Hey Jude seems a perfectly adult reaction when Sunak, or one of his cohorts, begins to speak.
Take Friday evening and his portentous appearance at the lectern in Downing Street. Dressed up as being a brave defence of democracy, it was actually an attempt to scrabble out of a hole Sunak had plunged into earlier in the week when, extraordinarily, he suggested that the country had been taken over by “mob rule”.
The Labour leader, Sir Keir Starmer, could hardly disagree with the PM’s tribute to democracy, so was supportive. But it was surreal to hear Sunak say: “We must face down the extremists who would tear us apart…When they tell their lies, we will tell the truth.”
Might he have in mind someone who stated that Islamists had taken control of London through its mayor? Yes, that’s the former Conservative deputy chairman, Lee Anderson. He has been suspended for his remarks – well, he was originally suspended for refusing to apologise for the remarks, but then the messaging evolved a bit.
Now the party can’t bring itself to say that Anderson won’t be allowed to rejoin the Conservatives. Because his is the right wing message that appeals to many in the party.
And don’t forget that, while Sunak was preaching understanding and inclusivity from his Downing Street lectern, he remained perfectly content to allow MPs other than Anderson to be shrieking a very different message to a frighteningly enthusiastic public.
Former home secretary Suella Braverman took to the columns of the Daily Telegraph to declare that “Islamists are in charge of Britain now”. That sounds like just the sort of incendiary comment Sunak had in mind when he talked of facing down “the extremists who would tear us apart”.
Yet Ms Braverman has not been sacked by the party. She says what she likes, as does former PM Liz Truss, who was last seen sharing a platform with a collection of the nastier far right headbangers who could be assembled for a conference.
Sunak may not agree with their views; indeed, he might even have believed much of what he said in that Downing Street speech. But the fact is that he would not risk a single vote for a principle. He knows that the precarious hold the Conservative Party has on votes at the next election will depend, in part, on appealing to the far right factions who blame immigration for all the country’s ills.
The fact is that those numerous problems have numerous causes and will take many years to fix. As the country limps towards the election, nothing is being done to tackle the problems and the supply of sticking plasters to hold things together is fast running out.
Huge amounts of parliamentary time and effort are being expended on Sunak’s vanity project, the Rwanda immigration scheme. If a single immigrant boards a plane to the east African country, it will be at an estimated cost of £1.8m per head. This is madness, not least because nobody seriously believes that, even if the scheme does become operational, it will succeed with the bigger aim of “stopping the boats”.
But, if a single illegal immigrant takes flight for Rwanda before the end of the year, at least Sunak will have succeeded in one of his aims: he would win his £1,000 bet with Piers Morgan. At the moment, it looks like his best chance of winning anything.
