Things Fall Apart

This week: what exactly is my problem with Rishi Sunak? What happened to MI1 to MI4? Also, they’ve extended the Birmingham Metro, huzzah.

I’ve been trying to work out for some time now what it is that annoys me so much about Rishi Sunak.

The more flattering explanation is: he sucks at his job, and for a long time it felt like hardly anyone had noticed. He used the budget just weeks before Cop-26, to slash taxes on domestic flights, which is the exact opposite of good, green policy. Through Eat Out To Help Out he subsidised affluent people to have nice lunches, all the while refusing to fund decent sick pay, thus almost certainly contributing to the spread of covid. For heaven’s sake, the man ordered the Royal Mint to make an official government NFT. He’s awful. 

And yet he remained infuriatingly popular, because for a few crucial months in 2020 he was spraying money around like water. If you find a message isn’t getting through, the temptation is to repeat it, but louder. So I ended up yelling hysterically about how bad Sunak was, like Cassandra yelling hysterically about a horse.

The less flattering explanation is: it’s just personal bitterness. After all, during those crucial months of 2020 when government largesse was flowing, there were those of us who were excluded, because we were relatively recently self-employed: since the Treasury didn’t have an appropriate database to work out how much money to give us, it decided to compromise, by giving us nothing. It is hard to join in with the widespread enthusiasm for a politician who has responded to questions about how you are to pay your bills during this unprecedented economic crisis by pointing instead to how generous he has been towards other people. 

Then again, perhaps it’s just personal bitterness, but in a completely different way. Sunak has the effortless and smooth self-confidence that a certain educational and professional background will give you. I, despite my own poncy education and my very obvious big mouth, do not have this effortless self-confidence. Those who do, however, are inescapable in the British media, and so, as I may have already noted, I am incredibly bitter about it. 

But after watching Sunak’s performance in Monday night’s BBC debate, I’ve concluded that it’s something else. The thing that annoys me about Rishi Sunak is that he is a man who simply cannot see how he might appear.