Bad luck comes in threes.

 

We are in for our fifth Prime minister in six years and, if you live in Scotland, the tenth Tory Prime Minister you wouldn't have voted for. They, and that includes my mother-in-law, say that bad luck comes in threes and, right on cue, along comes the third Conservative Prime Minister this year. This time the Conservatives aren’t even pretending that there’s anything democratic about it, Rish! Sunak, with his exclamation mark of ambition, becomes Prime Minister despite having been rejected by his own party just six weeks ago. He does so without facing a single hustings, a single interview, or even the most cursory questioning, never mind facing any sort of vote, not from his party members, and certainly not from the wider public. He didn’t even make any public statements during the truncated leadership contest. Sunak become Prime Minister after party elders stitched it up by themselves behind closed doors, the kind of process you more normally associate with a tinpot dictatorship. It was traditionally said that the Westminster system, which hands almost unlimited power to the Prime Minister, is an elected dictatorship, now the Conservatives have dispensed with the elected part, we are just left with the dictator.

Sunak is the guy who, during his failed leadership campaign a few weeks ago, boasted about taking public money away from the most deprived areas in order to give it to leafy and well-heeled Conservative constituencies. We will now have an unelected multi-millionaire imposing austerity and spending cuts on the poorest and the most vulnerable, making them pay for the economic havoc caused by his own party. You can bet it won’t be Sunak, who, together with his wife, has an estimated fortune of £730 million, or his rich cronies who will suffer financially due to the Conservative created economic crisis assailing Britain. It will be benefits claimants, the low paid, and ordinary struggling households. Actually, not just them. We are not in those categories but it's going to affect us as well.

Let's not forget that Sunak is a right-wing Tory, not the Angel Gabriel. During his previous failed leadership bid, Sunak vowed to extend ‘vilification of the UK’ to the definition of extremism and people deemed to be guilty of vilification of Britain would be referred to the anti-extremist Prevent programme. Sunak vowed to “root out those who are vocal in their hatred of our country”. Peter Fahy, a former senior police chief denounced Sunak’s plan, saying it strayed into thought crime. The Tories are now trying to tell us that Sunak is a ‘safe pair of hands’ who can be trusted to make the right decisions on the economy, but Sunak told us in 2016 that Brexit would be good for the economy, an assertion which was obviously wrong then and is even more painfully wrong now. The questionable nature of Sunak’s judgement was also evident from his ‘eat out to help out' scheme during the pandemic which at great cost to the public purse was estimated by researchers to have been responsible for one sixth of Covid cases during the late summer of 2020. Then he handed over £37bn to his Tory cronies for dodgy PPE contracts which were never delivered. Sunak is no one’s saviour, certainly not ours, and not the Tory party’s either. Now, as he introduces a new round of austerity, his new scheme will be 'eat nowt to help out' the rich.

Unburdened by any public mandate as he is, Sunak has, entirely unsurprisingly, ruled out an early general election. This is because the Tories are terrified of the verdict of the people. If there was to be a general election within the next few weeks, the Tories would be facing electoral oblivion.

After accepting the crown, sorry, job, Sunak addressed the public with a brief acceptance speech that made Liz Truss seem like an animated and engaging public speaker. Then he left without taking questions. Why should he take questions? It’s not like he’s accountable to anyone. We shouldn’t be surprised that Sunak struggled with the auto-cue, and both looked and didn’t look at the camera at the same time After all, he can’t fuel up a car properly or work a contactless card machine. He has staff for that sort of thing.

The fact that a British Asian and practising Hindu has become Prime Minister has been hailed as a victory for diversity and inclusivity but, sadly, his party's policies are very much a defeat for the very same. However, it is genuinely moving that we have a Prime Minister whose wife is a billionaire, and we can all be proud that someone has finally climbed their way up from private school to Oxbridge to merchant banker to Prime Minister, taking in immense wealth and privilege along the way. Truly yet another man of the people.

Sunak’s coronation represents the final collapse of the democratic pretensions of the Westminster Parliament. We have an appointed Prime Minister who was rejected by his own party just a few weeks ago, who does not have the support of Conservative members or the wider electorate , and who is about to embark on a damaging new round of austerity for which the Conservatives have no mandate. An austerity which is only necessary because of Conservative lies about Brexit and their mismanagement of the economy. The Tories will try to avoid a General Election as long as they can in an effort to stave off the damning verdict that will surely be passed on them by the electorate, but the very best that they can hope for now is that he can salvage a few seats from the political wreckage that calls itself the Conservative and Unionist party.

The Tories have broken democracy, they have broken the economy, they have broken Britain and they have broken the union. There is a crumb of comfort in that among the damage that they have wrought, the Conservatives have also broken themselves. Here’s hoping it finishes them off for good. But I'm not holding my breath: it's amazing what can happen when you've got the right wing media on your side.