Round and round in circles. The wheels coming off. Skid marks everywhere. Crashing out at the first corner. Getting lapped. Stalled at the start. The pits. Burning up fossil fuels. Mired in sex scandals. You can write your own jokes here. Someone in Conservative headquarters must really have it in for Rishi Sunak. Either that or Isaac Levido and James Forsyth are secret Labour stooges. Why else would the Tories have chosen Silverstone as the venue for their manifesto launch? Surely someone must have foreseen what was coming. Or maybe everyone is now just along for the rollercoaster ride. Leaning into the mother of all car crashes. In the main hall – a cavernous, soulless room that could have been anywhere: not a racing car in sight – Tory aides were spotted removing several rows of chairs. Clearly short of numbers. Over in the media pen, a waiter was explaining why the coffee wasn’t really coffee. It was just hot water in a jug marked coffee. Piss ups and breweries came to mind.
We waited. And we waited. Staring at the words “Clear Plan. Bold Action. Secure Future” on the stage backdrop. Empty, meaningless slogans. Symbolic tokens of Tory failure. There isn’t a person in the country who really believes them. Not even Rish!. The event was meant to kick off at 11.30 but it was 11.45 before most of the cabinet shuffled in. Those we haven’t loved. Nothing works as it should in this country any more. Kemi Badenoch grim-faced. There under duress, biding her time. Michael Gove spaced out. No sign of Penny “Penelope Pit Stop” Mordaunt. She was planning her parliamentary afterlife. The others merely grinned sheepishly. Lambs to the slaughter. Like the politburo at Stalin’s funeral. Unsure of whether to laugh or cry. First to the stage was the education secretary, Gillian Keegan. “I never dreamed that one day I would introduce the Tory party manifesto,” she said. You and me both, Gillian. Don’t worry. It will never happen again. Then came the Teesside mayor, Lord Houchen. Or Ben as he likes to be called. A peerage from Boris Johnson is a devalued honour. “I’ve known Rishi for nine years,” he said. So that’s all fine then. Vote Labour and get Armageddon. Bring it on. It can’t be any worse than the last 14 years. So please stand and give a big welcome to … the prime minister. The cabinet reacted as if they had been electrocuted. It’s a measure of just how disaffected and disengaged they all are that no one wanted to be seen to be openly disloyal by being last to stand. The guilt trigger. The applause in the room bordered on the hysterical. The Tory party really are losing it. But nothing happened. There was no sign of Rish!. Again we waited. Eventually somebody unlocked the door and let him in. That too was worth an extra round of applause. Finally, calm. And then Sunak delivered what must be his most demotivational speech yet. Almost a resignation statement. Just 20 minutes of everyone’s time they will never get back. A speech devoid of affect. You could sense the despair in every sentence. Just chucking as many bribes as he could think of into the air, knowing they were all meaningless. His credibility is shot. We know it. He knows it. There’s no longer any attempt to disguise his shortcomings. We’re just filling in time until the final curtain. We’re here because we’re here because we’re here. “We’ve turned a corner,” Rish! smiled wanly. We had all come to Silverstone just to hear that one lame metaphor. The manifesto was about bold actions, he went on. Except it wasn’t. It was one long panic attack. A last, desperate throw of the dice. Sunak can no longer pretend that the Tories haven’t fucked things up. All he can do is offer a less than heartfelt apology on behalf of five prime ministers and the empty promise that everything will be better in the future. You’d need to be lobotomised to go along with that. And if your latest policies are so good, then why didn’t you implement them earlier? On we went. Part dirge, part threnody. The last rites. The world is an unsafe place, he said. Then why did you dismantle so much of the armed forces? “We need to stand with our allies.” Of course we do. So that’s why you did an early flit back home from the D-day celebrations. Because nothing says brothers in arms like turning your back on your friends.
After that it was bargain-basement time. Everything must go. A meditation on failure and greed. People could have whatever they wanted. Anything. Just please vote Tory. Don’t like foreigners? Then the flights to Rwanda would start in July. Really? In which case why didn’t you wait till after the summer to call an election. This was shameless and completely lightweight. Not even the Tories are falling for this. Don’t like the ECHR? Then we could rip up international treaties. Be more like Russia and Belarus. Such a good look. Then on to the tax cuts. Free money for everyone. It’s a wonder he didn’t just start handing out £50 notes to everyone in the audience. We were operating in a total intellectual vacuum. The week of magical thinking. Only last week Sunak was accusing Labour of being dishonest about the economy. Now he had found £17bn to give away. Roll up, roll up. And how was this to be paid? By cutting the number of civil servants – most of them were lazy – and cracking down on tax evasion. The fantasy of the magic money tree was back. Huge public service cuts were coming. We would all be broke. It was like Liz Truss had never gone away. Rish! tried to mitigate the disaster by only taking questions from what he hoped was largely friendly media. Except no one is friendly any more. He and his government’s credibility is totally shot. All anyone wanted to know was why anyone should believe anything he said. No one even bothered to refer to the manifesto costings as everyone in the room was agreed they were all imaginary. “I’m proud of my record,” he said. How sweet. No one else is. Certainly not the Tory party. Everything is on its knees. Now, Rish! got tetchy. Annoyed that all these idiots were daring to question him. Why couldn’t the world bend to his will? He even tried to say his was a family steeped in small business. Must have forgotten his wife and father-in-law. That was that. Things to do, places to go. The launch was dead on arrival. Tory candidates who had been waiting on a miracle left to confront a bleak reality. The cabinet rose to give a final round of applause. They shook hands with each other. A form of goodbye. It would be the last time many of them would be in the same room together.