It was just a dream!

Political hacks are treating Rishi Sunak as Prime Minister like a soap opera reboot...

It was the subject line of Christopher ‘Chopper’ Hope’s Telegraph newsletter, an aside in a New Statesman piece (written by Times Radio correspondent and Sunday Times columnist Charlotte Ivers), the first line of Rachel Sylvester’s analysis of Sunak’s speech in Downing Street, and part of a James O’Brien monologue on LBC:

The grown-ups are back in charge.

Incapable of defining, explaining, or decrying the derangement, because they are actors in it and catalysts for it, British political journalists pretend this is all normal.

There’s a familiar process for reporting on the arrival of a new Prime Minister — the helicopter shots of the cars heading to and from Buckingham Palace, the loitering on Downing Street saying a lot about nothing, the repetition of ‘interesting’ facts, the ‘humanising’ anecdotes and the comparisons to previous occupants of Number 10 — and it was followed as usual. That the circus was back in town just 49 days after the last performance didn’t matter; the clowns shovelled the elephant shit and grinned.

The BBC’s Chief Political Correspondent, Nick Eardley, wrote…

… the transition of power can be brutal. Liz Truss’s team won’t have long to move out of Downing Street. In the next couple of hours, Rishi Sunak’s will be moving in and getting their feet under the table.

I’ve spoken to people who’ve been involved in this process in the past and it can be a bit chaotic as everyone tries to find out where their new office is.

… as if this is not simply the same party reshuffling its deck chairs, as though Sunak is somehow a stranger to Downing Street when, in fact, he and his administration are less “new broom” than Trigger’s broom¹.

After Sunak’s speech — not “on the steps of Downing Street” as the resilient cliché has it — Emily Maitlis tweeted:

Sunak tone spot on — talked about “compassion” in his decisions — we haven’t heard that word for a long, long time. And bold enough to say he was there to clean up Truss mistakes. No hiding from that.

Words continue to be drained of their meaning, becoming hollow husks of symbolism; Liz Truss’ 49 days as Prime Minister are casually referred to as an “era” while “compassion”, bled dry during the Cameron years, is to be exsanguinated once again.

In the snap analysis of Sunak’s speech provided by The Times’ stable of talking heads, you can see how the reboot is shaping up; another bout of collective delusion and targeted amnesia is on the cards. Rachel Sylvester writes:

The grown-ups are back in charge. That was Rishi Sunak’s message, after years of chaos, rule-breaking and crisis under Boris Johnson and Liz Truss.

There were no promises of sunny uplands or a new dawn in this sombre and serious speech from the new prime minister on the steps of No 10. The adoring fans or waving crowds that traditionally cheer a leader into Downing Street had been banished and Sunak was wearing a grey tie.

She knows as you know that the lack of supporters, the “sombre” tone, and the grey tie are no less presentational tricks than Boris Johnson’s scruffed-up hair. These are the symbols of ‘competence’ cut loose from content or context. Sylvester goes on:

After years of division and culture wars, Sunak promised to govern with “compassion” and appoint a cabinet that represents the “very best” from all wings of the Tory party. “Trust is earned and I will earn yours,” he told the voters.

In July, Sunak told a hustings in West Sussex:

Whether it’s pulling down statues of historic figures, replacing the school curriculum with anti-British propaganda or rewriting the English language so we can’t even use words like ‘man’, ‘woman’ or ‘mother’ without being told we’re offending someone?

Throughout that leadership campaign, he promised to do “whatever it takes” to make the Rwanda deportation scheme work. But today is all about pretending he’s shiny and new, not remembering things he said three months ago.

The labrador-like desire to wag yourself senseless over tone and not content continues in Iain Martin’s review:

At last, here was the return to something approaching competent statecraft and dignified speechmaking. Rishi Sunak’s remarks made outside No 10 before he headed inside to get down to work were delivered in a style that was refreshingly straightforward and even humble.

… after the shambles inflicted by Boris Johnson in the past year, and then the ill-starred Truss experiment, there is at least now a prime minister in place who looks serious and engaged with reality.

The word “looks” is critical here; what Sunak said and did in the past is less important than the impression of competence, whether he might feasibly be cast as the Prime Minister in a Netflix miniseries about Westminster intrigue that gets all the London geography wrong.

We’re meant to warm to him because he likes Star Wars as if liking that multi-billion dollar film franchise is a delightfully eccentric choice for a man born in the 80s. The Sun’s front page today has him wielding a light sabre above the headline The Force Is With You Rishi. Harry Cole, the paper’s very own Salacious Crumb, has quickly shifted his loyalty from Boris Johnson’s sloppy Jabba the Hutt jollity to Sunak’s imperial bridge officer coldness.

However, Cole’s sucking up (“Tory MPs turned to Star Wars nut rishi Sunak as their ‘new hope’ yesterday,”) isn’t even the weirdest example. Faded news star Alastair Stewart (“I am big! It’s the autocue text that got smaller!”) tweeted:

It is admired in Pony Club circles that Rishi Sunak is one of those dads who stays behind to help put the jumps away after riding sessions.

The quest to turn “admired in Pony Club circles” into the insulting euphemism it’s destined to become starts now.

In The Times, Lord Ashcroft’s retelling of Sunak and Akshata Murty’s meet cute gets the front page of the Times 2 supplement (Mrs Merton voice: “So what first attracted you to billionaire’s daughter, Akshata Murty?”) and the news pages assure readers that this is destiny (Sunak neighbours knew GP’s son Rishi had a bright future). Meanwhile, The Daily Telegraph finds 500 words to discuss lecterns.

In its comment section, the Telegraph’s head-bangers are equally taken by Sunak’s tone. The gibbering Andrew Lilico, already allowed to shake off the stink of being a Truss cheerleader and advisor, claims Sunak might be “lucky”, while the paper’s tame former Labour MP, Tom Harris, compares him to…

a sympathetic bank manager dealing with a distraught couple on the verge of losing their home, promising to do everything he could to help them, while carefully nor promising to deliver the impossible.

Presumably, in that analogy, the distraught couple is unaware that the sympathetic bank manager was the sidekick of the last bank manager but one who used the premises to film his own Carry On films after hours. Oh, and they’re happy to stick with a firm that fired the previous branch manager for gross incompetence.

Martine Croxall was taken off air by the BBC after saying she was “gleeful” in the introduction to the BBC News channel newspaper review on Sunday night, 90 minutes after Boris Johnson announced he wasn’t standing in the Tory leadership contest. The claim, pushed hard by the usual ghouls, is that she “breached impartiality” by saying:

Well this is all very exciting, isn’t it? Am I allowed to be this gleeful? Well, I am.

Actually, the problem was not that she was showing anti-Boris Johnson bias — I don’t think she was — but that she was, like so many in the British media, treating politics like a soap opera.

That’s what we’ve endured on Rishi Sunak’s coronation day; an old character brought back with a new plotline; political hacks acting as if Bobby Ewing has emerged from the shower, the events of the “Who shot the UK economy?” storyline all just a dream.

Thanks for reading.

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1. Yes, I could have written “the ship of Theseus” but I’m not Mary Beard or Boris Johnson.