DAMP SQUIB OF THE WEEK
There comes a time, pretty early on in a prime minister’s tenure, when defining himself purely in terms of what he’s not is no longer sufficient and he has to start giving the electorate some idea of who he IS.
This is true of all novice prime ministers, especially once the “bounce” in the poll numbers from which they traditionally benefit just after being appointed has ebbed away. Alas for our current next former prime minister, Rishi Sunak, he didn’t get a bounce so much as a faintly audible splat.
Now, with our country seized with industrial strife the likes of which we haven’t seen since the “winter of discontent” which ushered in the reign of Margaret Thatcher, and lurching towards the kind of civil unrest which ended it, it’s more incumbent upon Mr Sunak than ever to present the nation with some sort of positive vision for the future (while somehow drawing a discreet veil over the extent to which he’s responsible for its present).
And so it was that Mr Sunak last week announced his Five Pledges, and lo, the nation could scarcely contain its indifference.
GLARING OMISSION OF THE WEEK
Among Mr Sunak’s pledges – which included one to reduce inflation, which most economists agree is about to happen anyway and isn’t even really up to him – there was only one that even pretended to address the actual problems under which the nation currently finds itself mired. This was, of course, the pledge to “cut NHS waiting times”. What there wasn’t (and while I appreciate that these were just meant to be policy ambitions outlined in the broadest terms, but it would’ve been nice to see something about this in there) was any mention of how this was likely to be achieved, ie are they going to give the NHS any more money?
Because, hey – don’t you remember reading something on the side of a bus once about £350m a week extra for the NHS once we left the EU? Well, in two weeks’ time it will be three years since we left the EU… by my calculations that means the government has saved £54.6bn for the express purpose of spending it on the NHS! I wonder where they’re hiding it?
NON-ANSWER OF THE WEEK
Things only got worse for Mr Sunak on Sunday morning, when he refused to answer a direct question put to him by Laura Kuenssberg on the BBC on the subject of whether he and his family employ the services of a private GP.
Now I’m not a gambling man, but I’m willing to bet several of my major organs that Mr Sunak and family do indeed use a private GP. Partly because anyone worth £750m who does NOT have a private GP – and indeed, a private everything else – has kind of missed the point of being that rich. But mainly because if he didn’t have a private GP, the answer would’ve been “No, I don’t.”
SPIRITUAL BREAKTHROUGH OF THE WEEK
A nugget of enlightenment came last week from a most unusual source – one Julia Hartley-Brewer, who had lately been starting to make a modicum of sense, until she unfortunately took the side of chinless arch-creep (and current guest of Romanian law enforcement) Andrew Tate in his Twitter-spat with eco-heroine Greta Thunberg, which, you’ll remember, he started, before ending up getting so comprehensively owned that he might as well have been wearing a red leather gimp suit with “Yes Mistress Greta” stitched into the mask.
Anyway, Ms Hartley-Brewer took to Twitter herself last Friday to opine, with a heroic lack of self-awareness, that: “We live in an increasingly divided, polarised country because of grifters who keep stirring up those divisions.” Wow. The words “kettle” and “pot” do rather spring to mind. She concluded: “Our country isn’t perfect but everything was going in the right direction until the advent of these new divisions.”
Of course. I’ve been so blind. I’d always thought that blithe complacent ignorance was the sort of mindset you should urgently snap yourself out of when you realise you’ve drifted into it, but now I realise it’s a state you should STRIVE TO ACHIEVE like some sort of smug privileged Nirvana…
Altogether now: Everything is great as long as nobody points out that it isn’t. Ommmmmmm…
POEM OF THE WEEK
Politicians who know better
Clutch at bigots’ votes
By blaming woes upon all those
Who sail on tiny boats
The tabloids and the shock jocks
Peddle spurious anecdotes
Slandering all those who cling
To leaky little boats
Our nation wasn’t hobbled
By crooked billionaires
But those who flee across the sea
The fault is clearly theirs
The ginger prince gets on TV
And our collective goats
We’ll blame our strife upon his wife
And those who ride the boats
