Yet Another Bad Campaign Week for Sunak - Can it Get Any Worse?
Russell Jones, author of 'The Decade in Tory' and 'Four Chancellors and a Funeral', on the tragicomic meltdown of a week for Rishi Sunak and the Conservatives
It has not been Rishi Sunak’s greatest week. But then again, can you name a previous week that has been? He’s spent his entire premiership wandering listlessly from calamity to catastrophe and back again, like a latter-day Micawber, chanting a mantra that ‘something will turn up’.
What turned up was Nigel Farage, with a smile like the brass plate on a coffin lid, reassuring those with the memory of a goldfish that he shared their grievances, having personally caused most of them.
Grievances are Farage's business, and business is good. So now he’s back again, going head to empty-head with the Conservatives over the trophy for Most Batshit Vision of Britain.
In Sunak’s topsy-turvy Britain, poor people are skint because we’ve given them all the money, while those who are drowning in riches remain too poor to pay tax. In Farage’s arsy-versy Britain, foreigners have ruined the country so much that everybody wants to come and live here, and we no longer need a state: the bulldog spirit will protect us from the tyranny of spivs.
The only fly Nigel’s ointment is the sheer number of conspiracy-theorists, wackadoos, and actual living breathing Nazis standing for Reform. This week he threatened to sue his vetting company for not doing anything to stop him becoming a magnet for those who think Hitler was brilliant.
Unfortunately, it turns out Farage’s vetting deal came down to him giving somebody £144k in exchange for a license to do the job himself, which, being the details-oriented guy we’ve come to expect, he hadn’t noticed.
I guess he’ll see himself in court.
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