Mister Sunak Regrets … The prime minister has never much liked scrutiny. He considers himself to be one of the world’s natural leaders. A man born to the elite. Someone to be listened to in silence. Whose thoughts are to be absorbed and treasured. Not someone who is to be in any way held accountable for his actions. Worse still, be judged by those whom he considers beneath him. Us, in other words. Rishi Sunak never much liked being questioned when he was just an ordinary MP. Meeting real people has never been his style. I mean, what do you actually say to them? You can feel the awkwardness when he does his PM Disconnect events. “Hello, Little Person. What do you want?” He liked it still less when he became chancellor, though most people tended to like him back then as his sole purpose was to hand out billions of pounds of free money during the Covid pandemic. But since Rish! has become prime minister he has become positively phobic about being held to account. The prospect of him actually needing to have principles terrifies him. In any question and answer session, he’s sure to get snitty within seconds. He’s far happier just dividing up the world with a Goldman Sachs spreadsheet where people are reduced to expendable, inanimate objects. So much so that he now has two full-time members of staff whose sole job is to get him out of anything he doesn’t want to do. A quasi subcommittee of the Cabinet Office. They aren’t short of work. When Sunak was in danger of having to vote on whether it was acceptable for a former prime minister to lie to parliament, his crack team went into overdrive. Phoning every charity with an event that night to ask if they wanted a special guest speaker. The only rider was that the speech would have to be given at 9.30pm so there was no danger of him being free in time to vote. Sure enough, they found Rish! a gig and their boss was off the hook. Mister Sunak Regrets … That was a one-off though. The team’s main job is to think of excuses for longstanding engagements. Like Tuesday’s liaison committee. They couldn’t give it a total swerve but they negotiated it down to 90 minutes so none of the members would have time to ask anything that difficult. Job done. And – naturally enough – they are always on the look-out for excuses to avoid prime minister’s questions. Rish!’s least favourite 30 minutes of the week. How dare the leader of the opposition make him look mediocre! So far the team has got Sunak out of four PMQs with a variety of feeble excuses. He needed to take his dog to the groomers. The nanny was ill. Rish! has no shame about his absenteeism. He already has the worst attendance record of any prime minister. Imagine being worse than Boris Johnson and Liz Truss?
Make that five times. Because on Wednesday the No 10 team came up with a brilliant plan. To organise a service at Westminster Abbey for the 75th anniversary of the NHS – the country’s preferred religion – at the same time as PMQs. The Dean had suggested an earlier start time so that Sunak could fulfil his obligations to parliament, but the team had said it was quite OK as it was. He would be happy to accept a subsequent engagement. So it would be a bit weird having a prime minister celebrating a health service he almost never used, but he could live with that. When you’ve taken as many moral short cuts as Sunak, there’s always room for another. So the email went out. Mister Sunak Regrets … The other deciding factor in Rish! electing to go awol so frequently is that in Oliver Dowden he has the ideal deputy. Someone with no obvious talents. The Man Without Qualities. The Nonentity’s Nonentity. Not even Olly really knows what Olly does. Or what he’s good at. The best guess is as an extra in the 1980s sitcom Hi-de-Hi! Though he really doesn’t have the charisma for that. He’s a man born to follow. Not quite as bright as a dog. But nearly. So there’s never any danger of Dowden showing the boss up. No one is ever going to imagine Olly as a serious replacement for Sunak. And that is the main point of him. The downside for the rest of us is that it makes PMQs even more pointless than usual. We all know Olly is just there to kill time and has nothing to say but parliament still insists on going through the unnecessary performance. Most MPs at least have the luxury of staying away. Which they did. There are always plenty of empty seats even for Rish! these days – a measure of just how badly he performs – but for Olly there are even more than usual. One person who did make a rare appearance was Door Matt Hancock. Sulking that he hadn’t been given an invite to the Abbey. After all he had done for the NHS. Normally Angela Rayner comes into her own on occasions like this, but too much close contact with Olly has dragged her down. She won the exchanges easily – how could she not? If you breathe, you’re more than Dowden’s equal – but it was all very low-key. She asked about mortgages, housing and renters’ rights and Olly acted as if she was talking a different language. He was totally out of his depth. All he could do was lie about the government delivering on Sunak’s Five Vague Suggestions. Everything was going brilliantly. He couldn’t understand why the country wasn’t more grateful to the Conservatives. It wasn’t clear if even he believed that. It was all very downbeat. Soporific. Thank god then for Mhairi Black. The SNP deputy leader had said she would be leaving parliament at the next election. She won’t be forgotten after this. Olly tried to pay her a compliment, saying they had arrived in Westminster together in 2015. None of your pre-scripted gags for Black. Lightening quick she replied that she was pretty sure they’d be leaving parliament at the same time too. Olly smiled. But only just. Deep down, that hurt. Because it could well be true. And what then? Were there actually jobs in the real world that someone as hopeless as him could do? Second-top of the world, Ma. Not so much. Mister Sunak Regrets …