There is nothing a politician loves more than a bus. They’re so versatile. You can paint slogans on them when you want your lies immortalised, and colour them pink to indicate (Harriet Harman, how could you? Circa 2015) that you’re a great big feminist. You can get an open-top bus if you want to look racy (Lee Anderson, nearly taking his own head off on a motorway, last week), but most of all, you can stand in front of one. No politician of the modern era has ever been seen using a bus in the regular way, to get from one place to another, but apparatchiks love it (I’m guessing) because it’s the ultimate transport of the people, not too green but green enough, not too expensive. In meetings, they probably still call it the “omnibus”. And so to the Heanor depot in Derbyshire, where Rishi Sunak launched his local election campaign. The place was absolutely lousy with omnibuses, all of them headed in the same direction, to the slaughter, carrying this surprisingly pugnacious lamb. He waved a lot and castigated the arrogance of Keir Starmer, thinking he could just walk into Downing Street without telling anyone what his plan was. It was a peculiar, curiously engaging spectacle, the prime minister describing exactly his own behaviour, not 18 months ago, waltzing in through the big black door with no more explicit plan than “I’ll be different to that last chancer”, and projecting it on to his opponent. I’m hoping for a lot more of this as the campaign careens towards disaster. “Tsk, look at Keir Starmer over there, boosting the National Grid to heat his swimming pool”; “don’t vote for that guy, with his 95-quid sliders”. He wanted to talk about Labour-run councils – Nottingham, “effectively bankrupt”. After having a fire-sale of assets, they still can’t balance the books, in contrast to the extraordinarily well-run Conservative Nottinghamshire county council; Birmingham, and the scandal of its bankruptcy. A 21% rise in council tax for residents, decimated services, mismanaged finances. I find it quite hard to imagine anyone being taken in by this. Everyone knows that local authorities have taken savage hits to their spending power, due to cuts by central government. Say what you like about the Conservative party and their messaging, everyone is reasonably clear on one thing: that austerity was their idea. Nobody’s going to need more councils, of varying political hues, also going bust, to realise that the problem is a little more systemic. Every local authority is now like Schrödinger’s cat: it could be alive or dead, but if you open the box and look in, it’s dead. This is Sunak’s unlovely task of 2024, to keep the box closed until he’s out of office. Journalists should have dug deeper into Birmingham, because the pork barrel politics are incredible. Birmingham got £25m in household support fund last year, to support the poorest people in the city. This budget, that was slashed to £12.5m, while the “towns fund” gave £20m to Sutton Coldfield, the wealthiest of all 10 Birmingham constituencies. But why ask about that, when the day is so rich with more pressing issues? They ran such a gamut from “totally inconsequential” to “could be pretty major” that it gave the exchange a Radio 4 parlour game vibe, talking points picked out of a hat for a cheery uncle to take a run at. What did Sunak think of the new England shirt? For those who’ve not been concentrating, something is different about it, a flag is the wrong colour. The correct answer to this question would have been: “I don’t care about the England shirt, because I’m prime minister of a country that is sliding inexorably from ‘sick man’ to ‘basket case’, knocking against all the other phrases of decline that only politicians use but everyone kind of understands, and I need to focus on persuading maybe 15% of the country that it was someone else’s fault.” That wasn’t an answer he was able to give, unfortunately. He has plenty of bluster, but he doesn’t have what Ariana Grande would call Big Prime Minister Energy. This is emphatically not a literal comment on his size.
Instead, he dredged up: “My general view is that, when it comes to our national flags, we shouldn’t mess with them, because they are a source of pride, identity, who we are, and they are perfect as they are.” That’s a banker, mate. I’m definitely going to vote for the local party of the guy who thinks one red line across another red line is perfect. He doesn’t want to comment on Frank Hester, because it’s not appropriate. He doesn’t want to talk about Rwanda, for the obvious reason that it ain’t happening. He doesn’t want to talk about the Waspi pension issue, which women deserve compensation and how much the bill could run to, and, fair play, it’s complicated; it probably couldn’t be solved by soundbite. It will probably take nine court cases, an ITV drama and 17 years before anyone sees any money at all, and you can see how that would be awkward for Sunak to say out loud. But his answer, that “the right thing for us to do is to go through it carefully and give a considered response”, was like watching the swirling colour circle when your Mac stops responding. Will it ever wake up? Is it broken? Shhh. It’s thinking.