It’s all over bar the weeping and wailing and gnashing of Tory teeth – Rishi Sunak can afford to go to a private dentist and has never needed to worry about the struggles involved in getting registered with an NHS dentist. So, as he ruminates upon the magnitude of the well deserved electoral humiliation which awaits his miserable party, he can gnash his teeth to his heart’s content without having to worry about losing a filing.
On last Wednesday evening, Sky News hosted a debate between Sunak and Starmer. Well, it was billed as a debate but the two leading proponents of centre-right Anglo-British nationalism did not actually debate one another, rather they were each individually questioned by host, Beth Rigby, before taking questions from the audience in the auditorium of the town hall in Grimsby. A town in which almost 70% of the population voted to leave the EU, so you knew that neither Tweedledee nor Tweedledum was going to be asked hard questions about the immense damage that Brexit is causing to the British economy.
Sunak had previously given us a cringeworthy moment during an interview broadcast earlier on ITV - the interview that he’d buggered off early from the D-Day commemorations to get to. As it turned out, the interview merely compounded his D-Day woes, as he began it by apologising for showing up a bit late, claiming that the D-Day events had overrun. The interview contained just one moment of note, the multimillionaire Sunak’s bid to get himself some relatability by telling us that he had to do without Sky TV when he was a kid. Such deprivation! Opinions are divided over whether this was because, as Sunak would have us believe, his parents were scrimping and saving in order to send him to an expensive private school, or because middle class social climbers in the late 1980s and early 1990s thought that having a big satellite dish bolted to the side of your house merely advertised how common you were.
But then it was on to the more usual political embarrassment. Sunak at times appeared genuinely lost and crestfallen as he was grilled on his failure to fulfil the five pledges that he’d told us to judge him by. You’d almost feel sorry for him if he wasn’t such a lying entitled shyster. He was genuinely discomfited as he was booed by the studio audience after he blamed striking junior doctors for the lengthening waiting lists in the NHS. Sunak had pretty much mentally checked out by this point, wishing he was sipping a Mexican Coca Cola on a private executive jet en route to his luxury beachfront apartment in Malibu.
Starmer, unfortunately, came across as his usual glib and evasive self, stammering a bit when asked by an audience member why he was such a political robot - must have been a glitch in his programming at this point. He gave a singularly unconvincing non answer when asked why he’d wanted Jeremy Corbyn to be Prime Minister in 2019. Beth Rigby asked him: “You said, ‘I do think Jeremy Corbyn would make a great prime minister’, did you mean that?” But all that weasel words Starmer would say in reply was : “I was certain that we would lose the 2019 election.” Perhaps, that would be in no small measure due to the fact that Starmer and his allies on the right of the Labour party were doing their utmost to undermine Corbyn from within.
It wasn’t that Starmer did well in the debate but that Sunak did appallingly. In that respect the programme encapsulated the general election campaign in miniature. The post debate poll found that 64% thought Starmer did best while 36% opted for Sunak, proving only that 36% of people are idiots. There’s no love or enthusiasm for Starmer’s Tory-lite Labour party, but the actual Tories are just so hideously appalling that everyone except that 36% are actively repelled by them. And even many of that 36% won’t vote for them.
The Tories know the game is up. Earlier this week the Minister for multiple personalities, Grant Shapps, warned of the danger of allowing Starmer to win a supermajority. That’s not the sort of thing that a man who is convinced his party is going to do well would say.
Meanwhile The Guardian reports that the Tory campaign on the ground is descending into disarray with a chronic lack of staff and volunteers and a rising sense of panic even in seats which were once considered so safe that the party had never had to campaign to keep them.The original Tory strategy was the so called 80:20 approach, mounting a spirited defence in their 80 most marginal seats while trying to win the 20 most marginal seats held by other parties. But this strategy has disappeared as Tory MPs struggle for political survival. One party official told The Guardian: “The 80:20 plan no longer exists, if it ever did. We are diverting resources to safer and safer seats. People in seats which have been Conservative forever are basically shitting themselves. There is no strategy – it’s pretty much disarray.” Hooray for that.
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