At least Rishi Sunak’s life is almost as miserable as everyone else’s

At some point this weekend, our prime minister will be putting up his feet, either in or out of his eight hundred quid flip flops, and looking back on the week gone by and having, one has to think, at least a moment’s pause to wonder whether on earth any of this is worth the bother, writes Tom Peck

If you were him, would you even bother? (PA Wire)

They’re terrible bosses, aren’t they, the voters? Rishi Sunak knows full well he was fired barely a day in to the job, but he also knows he’s going to be made to work his notice right til the very last day.

If you were him, would you even bother? A man who banks the family money in India and has to be told by officials that he really does need to return the green card is a man who’s definitely got his eye on the horizon, and if you were him, wouldn’t you just make a dash for it now?

What’s the point, after all? Rishi Sunak is a very old-school Conservative, who only really has one belief in life, which is that you tax people as little as possible, let them keep as much of their own money as possible, and the market sorts out everything else.

And yet there he is, counting down his days in Downing Street, reading through report after report that makes it overwhelmingly clear that nothing is going to sort itself out because absolutely nobody has got any money (apart from him).

It’s the weekend now, and at some point, our prime minister will be putting up his feet, either in or out of his eight hundred quid flip flops, and looking back on the week gone by and having, one has to think, at least a moment’s pause to wonder whether on earth any of this is worth the bother.

Monday. Ah, right. One of my London mayoral candidates has been accused of sexually assaulting a novelist. He’s denied it, but while denying it, he’s also decided to withdraw from the race even though he’s definitely not done anything wrong, leaving two candidates, one of whom has precisely zero political experience and the other one is a Trump-supporting online troll.

How many people arrived by small boat this week? A few thousand, probably. That’s about par for the course. But it’s me that has to face up to the embarrassment of having the absurd Rwanda plan thrown out by the Court of Appeal.

And, yeah, there’s my home secretary, standing up in the House of Commons saying that “the British people will be disappointed by this verdict.” Which they will, but disappointed mainly by having ponied up a hundred forty million quid to a highly dubious government as a payment for a policy that’s very obviously illegal.

He does his best, one assumes, to try and forget that given the choice, the party he leads chose Liz Truss first and would swap either of them to have Boris Johnson back. And so it falls to him to have to try and discipline all of his many MPs who remain entirely in his thrall.

On Friday morning, there arrives a long letter from Zac Goldsmith, a man who is, objectively, probably the worst election loser British politics has ever produced, but also lends Boris Johnson his holiday villa and so is, inevitably, a member of the House of Lords.

Goldsmith’s credentials as a campaigner on environmental issues are real. He could and should be an asset to any government who cares about that sort of thing. And so there you are, publicly disowned, for being “uninterested” in the environment, a long list of your failings on such matters made public. But mainly, it’s only happened because you’ve had the temerity to ask him to apologise for having undermined the MPs whose job it was to investigate your mate for very obviously lying.

The best hope you’ve got is that no one has got the time or inclination to care about the very tedious nitty gritty of politics, because they’re too busy trying to deal with the endless despair and crushing reality of their own impossible lives? But then, they also blame you for that. There is, the “Tory mortgage premium”, it’s a real thing. And it will get worse, not better, in the year you’ve got left.

What, frankly, is the point? There’s no escape. But at least if the rest of us have to suffer, then so does he.