The candidate is a transy Goth with needle tracks, slit wrists, and a pierced tongue to help with her fundraising behind the dumpster in the alley. She has betrayed her upbringing, abandoned her principles, turned tricks with predators who despise her, and who don’t pay. She hates both herself and most of those who loved her once. Do you nonetheless vote for her, the Conservative Party?
Rishi Sunak is the carer for this damaged, deluded disaster. It can’t be easy. She betrays him freely, steals from his capital, fornicates his future and yet he comes to Commons every week to defend her from obloquy.
“The more they slag him off behind his back, the louder they cheer him in here.” Keir Starmer said. That was well observed. He may have a career in counseling.
Keir elaborated. His government crumbles around him. His party is only talking to itself. It’s all a complete sh*t show.
That was a surprise to hear from the despatch box. Those of us with pearls clutched them.
By way of return, Rishi landed a flurry of well-crafted punches: Starmer takes the knee, he wanted to abolish the monarchy, he still doesn’t know what a woman is, backs teaching white privilege in schools, represents terrorists, campaigned against deporting foreign criminals, and supported Jeremy Corbyn.
That was quite a combination of blows. The prime minister punches above his weight but the problem seems to be he just isn’t heavy enough.
Rishi lacks deadliness. It is the one quality missing from his portfolio of business management skills – the special evil that lines up an adversary and penetrates him psychologically before reaching into his chest cavity and pulling out a throbbing heart to eat it in front of his victim’s face. Its what we call leadership, and is an attribute that can’t be taught, only learnt.
When he responded to Layla Morgan’s excellent question (excuse the note of surprise) about Thames Water’s criminal uselessness (they’ve been flooding Oxfordshire rivers with sewage and charging customers for it), Rishi assured her that the Environment Agency “wouldn’t hesitate” to prosecute.
That’s not political leadership. That is a professional response. Rishi is a creature of the system. He knows that if you don’t play by the rules you can’t get anything done. But has he realized that this being England, if you do play by the rules you can’t get anything done either?
An Environment Agency listening to a leader gifted with deadliness would feel a sparkling sense of danger in their chest area and would have issued writs against Thames Water before the end of PMQs.
He did land one very effective wallop. Tahir Ali had given him a homily on humanitarian law, and said how South Africa’s case at the International Criminal Court had revealed the scale of Israel’s war crimes (Tory discontent). “Is not now the time for the prime minister to admit he has the blood of thousands of innocent people on his hands?” (Tory protests drown him out).
Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves at his side were both registering shock at this departure from their New Look Labour. “I have changed my party, he is bullied by his,” he had said earlier in the session, reprising a line from nearly 30 years ago.
And Rishi, hearing one and observing the others, paused. He weighed it up. He reached across the aisle, grasped the Member’s vital organ and yanked. “That’s the face of the changed Labour Party,” he said.
The shout of approbation this produced was quite unlike the normal chorus. To change the metaphor, it was a kill shot that went through three of them.
Theresa May stood up to give the House a lesson in her own brand of deadliness. She asked one of the duller questions of the year. She might have been reading from the Diabetics Phone Directory. But what a silence descended on the chamber as she spoke. That sharp-edged voice, fraught with suppressed pain – it laid out for us all her troubled self, and created such an atmosphere around her it silenced a multitude.
So much of it is in the voice.
Her slatternly party was shamed into respectability for almost ninety seconds.
