A week or so ago, Rishi Sunak appeared to be the cabinet outlier. The chancellor, who looked half the age of most of his colleagues, was the one most capable of delivering a press conference that connected with the country. Someone who can look people in the eye and accept responsibility for his actions. A rare quality in many politicians. Now, though, I’ve begun to wonder if Sunak’s impressive appearances at the daily Downing Street press conferences are less of a coincidence than they first appeared. Most of his older colleagues grew up on films and comics that still glorified or celebrated the second world war – beating the beastly Hun – so it’s no surprise perhaps that they are stuck in the mindset of the coronavirus as a battle to be won. An enemy to be beaten. The chancellor comes with none of that baggage. He wasn’t even alive when the first Star Wars film came out and was just two when ET was released. His childhood battles have been largely lived through light sabres and phasers. His cultural references belong to a different generation to those brought up on sticking it to Jerry. In short, he can speak 21st century human. It’s also fair to say Rishi has had to grow up fast. In his six months or so as chancellor, Sajid Javid didn’t get to deliver a single budget. In just under two months, Sunak is now on to his fourth. The first was the Brexit budget, that was largely a work of complete fantasy designed purely to reassure many in the Conservative party that everything was going to be just fine once we left the EU. Then came the first coronavirus budget for those on PAYE. Then the second for the self-employed. Now we have a third for the charity sector. Don’t rule out more in the coming weeks for those groups he comes to realise he’s still forgotten about. Not that Sunak could pretend he was doing more than a modest bail-out. The charity sector has been hit by £4bn losses and many staff lay offs, and all the chancellor had to offer was a relatively modest £750m package for those in the front line of fighting the coronavirus. But at least he was straightforward about what he was doing. No pretence that he could save every charity or every job. He even talked about the new spirit of people depending upon one another. Of kindness and decency. Words that would have had the near invisible Priti Patel and the all too visible Iain Duncan Smith choking on their early evening drinks. Despite insisting that it had moved at lightning pace from the start, the reality is the government spent the first two months doing next to nothing and has been playing a desperate game of catch up ever since. No amount of showing the same slide at every press briefing about how fewer people were using public transport was going to change that. Sunak’s three coronavirus budgets have been sticking plasters at best. Very expensive ones. The first misstep came when Sunak and the two health advisers tried to pretend that Prof Chris Whitty hadn’t said that testing had been key to Germany’s much lower mortality rate. He had. I and millions of others had heard him say just that. So trying to imply the Germans had cheated a bit by testing so many people and that the UK’s death rate might be just as low if we had done as much testing just felt shabby. All of a sudden, straight-talking Rishi didn’t appear quite so straight-talking. And he was also happy to let another minister break the news that the lockdown was not going to end any time soon. He was just there for the fun stuff.
Or maybe not quite. Sunak’s most terrifying utterance came almost as an afterthought. Asked whether, given that many economists have forecast that the coronavirus could hit GDP by more than 5% and send the UK into recession, it might not be a good moment to hit the pause button on the government’s commitment to ending transition at the end of the year, Sunak went into swivel-eyed Europhobe. The EU were an untrustworthy bunch of bastards and getting shot of them – even if it cost a million more jobs – was a price more than worth paying. Nothing would stop us leaving on December 31st. Not mass starvation. Not mass unemployment. Nothing. It was his commitment to the British people to make them as poor as was necessary. Maybe, Mr Nice Guy had been reading some of Boris’s old War Picture Library comics after all.