Sunak : Zero to Nero in six hours

Well that didn’t take long, did it? It took a couple of weeks for the sheer useless awfulness of Liz Truss’s government to become apparent, although admittedly that was in large part because all of politics came to a halt due to the compulsory British nationalist commournathon. However Rish! Sunak’s exclamation mark is certainly nothing if not efficient. Normally an incoming Prime Minister can count on a honeymoon period of goodwill during which the floating voter public and their own party are willing to give them the benefit of any doubt that is going. It took Liz Truss until the unveiling of her gob-smackingly bad mini-budget to destroy that goodwill. Rish! has managed it in a mere six hours.

Anyone who wasn’t a fully paid up member of the Conservative party had low expectations of Sunak to begin with, after all, this is the guy who spent the last two and a half years enabling Boris Johnson, got fined by the police for breaking lockdown, kept his US Green card and his wife’s non-dom status so the couple could avoid paying British taxes on their immense fortune, and then like the thin skinned man child that he is, acted like he was the victim when it became public knowledge. Even so, what little credibility he had left was blown completely out of the water with the announcement of his cabinet of Brexit liars, fools, people whose hobby is pulling the wings off flies, and retreads from the Johnson premiership. Sunak managed to go from zero to Nero in just six hours.

At midday Sunak was promising to restore ‘integrity, professionalism and accountability’ to government. By tea time he had put Suella Braverman back into the post of Home Secretary, just a few days after she had been forced to resign for what turned out to be gross and repeated breaches of the ministerial code and then lying to the Prime Minister about it.

Braverman is, and I do not say this lightly, a truly repugnant politician, even by the appallingly low standards we have come to expect of the detestable party. In her brief tenure in office under Liz Truss she managed to deliver a frankly infantile and petulant blast at her opposition counterpart, characterising those who still have a functioning moral compass and who oppose her institutionalised cruelty as ‘the tofu-eating wokerati’. Before entering Parliament her licence to practise law in New York state was suspended. According to human rights lawyer Shoaib Khan, “Can honestly say I have not met a single person who knows Suella Braverman, has worked with her or met her who has had anything positive to say. She’s just incompetent. He added, ” She’ll say things about law, which are plainly wrong and stick to it.”

The rise of Suella Braverman is one of the genuine mysteries of modern politics. She has no discernible charm, intellect or talent and projects cruelty like toxic radiation. She has lied about her experience, falsely claiming on her CV to have contributed to an important legal text book, a book whose authors assert that Braverman made no more contribution to than doing a spot of photocopying. The truth is that Braverman would be out of her depth as under secretary for photocopying.

Braverman also said that her ‘dream’ was to see a plane packed with desperate asylum seekers taking off on a one way trip to an oppressive central African dictatorship. There’s a word for people like Braverman who delight in their own cruelty and take pleasure from the suffering and misery of others, that word is sadist, and no one who claims that his government will be characterised by ‘integrity, professionalism, and accountability’ should put someone who clearly displays sadistic personality traits in a position of power over vulnerable people, and certainly not when that sadist was sacked from the same job just last week for committing a gross breach of the professional standards demanded of those in such a position. Putting her back in charge of the Home Office is an atrocity, It displays neither integrity, professionalism nor accountability on the part of Sunak, what it really displays is his political weakness and that is priority is to placate the warring factions of his deeply divided party in the vain hope that it will prevent them from plotting his downfall.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, we now also have the gurning mug of Michael Gove back in the cabinet, a man who thinks that it is perfectly acceptable to tell the most blatant and intelligence insulting lies as long as he’s terribly terribly polite while doing so.

We also have the return of Dominic Raab and his angrily throbbing temple vein, and just to pour caustic soda on the open wound, Gavin Williamson is back, the bastard offspring of Private Pike from Dad’s army and Joseph Goebbels. Even Tory commentator, founder of Conservative Home and G Beebies News presenter Tim Montgomerie was appalled by Williamson’s return to cabinet, tweeting : “A PM committed to integrity does not appoint Gavin Williamson to government.”

Williamson is a man who, let us not forget was previously sacked from the government for leaking national security information. It’s a mark of just how appalling the re-appointment of Braverman is that no one is talking about Williamson.

This is a cabinet which illustrates how tired and lacking in talent the Tories have become after Johnson’s purge of Conservative remainers. It’s a cabinet cobbled together in an attempt to buy Sunak some time.

We now have Robert Jenrick, Suella Braverman and Gavin Williamson back in the cabinet, all of whom were sacked for breaches of the ministerial code. This, apparently, is what passes for integrity, professionalism and accountability, in case you were wondering.

On Wednesday it was Sunak’s first PMQs, and what we got was truly dire. It was the exact same shtick we have come to know and loathe from Boris Johnson, a copy of all Johnson’s worst lines, but delivered by a low energy nerd, even down to the tired old Corbyn and Brexit jibes. It was not just poor, it was also dishonest.

It’s only Sunak’s first full day in the job and he is already coming under pressure to sack his Home Secretary and his judgement is being seriously questioned. Suella Braverman failed to turn up to the House of Commons to answer the Urgent Question on her resignation and reappointment as Home Secretary. Waste of space Speaker Lindsay Hoyle conveniently waite until Braverman had scuttled out the chamber before announcing the Urgent Question on her reappointment six days after resigning for misconduct over a security breach. Accountability much?

This, and Sunak’s lacklustre performance at PMQs will have done little to reassure jittery Tory nerves that he is the guy who can pull their failing party back from the electoral abyss.

It looks like we are going to be in for a news-packed week, unfortunately I might not be able to blog every day as my other half is going to the USA to visit his family, the first time he has seen them since the pandemic and since his sister passed away from covid. I will be staying at home as I am not really fit enough for a transatlantic trip. It’s the first time sine the stroke that he has gone away, some friends are coming to stay to help me as I’d struggle to manage by myself. I will blog when I can.

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