Well, here we go again

This week, Britain has a new government, how often does that happen, wow! Also, the internet has broken our brains, and a new way of measuring city size.

I was 10 years old before I lived through the fall of a Prime Minister, and 16 before I saw it happen again. This country has changed its leadership as many times in the last seven weeks as it did in the entire first quarter century of my life. Everything is fine. 

Actually, in some quarters there are attempts to suggest that, now, everything is fine. It can sometimes be hard to locate the needle of the original comment beneath the haystack of responses about how stupid it is; but there are people either so motivated to praise an incoming Tory Prime Minister, or so just so relieved Liz Truss is gone, that they’re willing to hail Rishi Sunak as our saviour. The days of kooky right-wing ex-think tankers treating Britain as some kind of experiment are over, they say. Finally, our long national nightmare has ended. The grown ups are in charge again.

A sort of metaphor. Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Well, this won’t surprise anyone who’s read this newsletter before, or who’s ever encountered a single word I’ve written, or frankly who is living on the same plane of reality as I am, but: bullsh*t.

Rishi Sunak is a kooky right-wing ex-think tanker (Policy Exchange, in his case). He is not, in any sense visible to the human eye, a centrist: in his support for a smaller state, for stingier welfare payments, for less redistribution between rich and poor areas, he is, in terms of economics, quite substantially to the right. To be fair to the man, he has never attempted to hide this, describing himself as a “Thatcherite”, even as colleagues and commentators alike decided he was the centrist option. (More on this from my former colleague George Eaton here.) His reputation is built almost entirely on vibes. 

Another reminder of how centrist he isn’t lies in his choice of Cabinet.