There seems to be no end to Rishi Sunak’s failures. You could sit for days trying to arrive at a comprehensive list and still find it incomplete. Each day of this interminable election campaign he’s provided us with some startling new example, some new previously unimagined fault to add to the collection.
Today, in a move no-one could have predicted, it was a comment about Sky TV and perhaps the most unconvincing account of deprivation any of us have ever heard.
It took place during an interview with ITV News – and not just any interview. This was the interview he left the D-Day celebrations to participate in. This is an important thing to remember as we pick apart the bones of what happened next. It’s not just that he said these things. It’s that he torpedoed his own election campaign in order to attend an interview in which he could say these things. He is the square root of political error. He manages to attain levels of inadequacy which were previously thought beyond the range of political leaders.
The Prime Minister was asked the type of question which politicians plan for. How can someone with your level of wealth understand what it’s like for everyday people? Have you ever gone without something?
If you’re a very wealthy man who happens to be prime minister, you’ll have workshopped your response to this inquiry. After all, it is one of your chief vulnerabilities. Sunak is literally richer than the King. He is so rich he exists outside the comprehension of most people in this country. His team would surely know the problems that could throw up. They must have sat down and tried to formulate a response for what to say if it comes up, yet Sunak’s answer showed no sign of that whatsoever. It involved hesitation, bluster, nonsense and outright preposterousness.
“What did you go without as a child?” he was asked. “Lots of things,” the Prime Minister replied, “because my parents wanted to put everything into our education and that was the priority.”
Notice the implication. There is a story being insinuated here, that people can struggle and pay school fees and help their kids get on in life. It’s a story of hardship and determination in a meritocratic society. And it suggests that those who do not do so have simply not made their children’s education a priority.
In reality, Sunak’s school fees would have been beyond the realm of most people’s understanding. The price of a year at Winchester College, which he attended, is currently £49,152 for boarding students – well above the average income. It will have been much lower when he went, of course, but the basic dynamic was the same. Winchester competes only with Eton for the affection of the super-rich. It’s a petri dish of supreme privilege.
At this point, Sunak travelled from disingenuousness to absurdity. He was repeatedly asked what he went without. He stammered and then settled on this response: “There are all sorts of things that I would have wanted as a kid that I couldn’t have. Famously Sky TV. That was something that we never had growing up, actually.”
Poor Rishi. Imagine the privation. Imagine the suffering of not having access to Sky One when you were growing up. The loneliness, the hunger for entertainment options, while always knowing that it was just out of reach. Perhaps sometimes he would catch glimpses of Sky Movies in people’s windows as he walked by, and would gaze up at them longingly, wondering what life must be like for those with such good fortune.
There are at least 2,800 food banks in this country. People out there are going without much worse than satellite television. They are going without daily necessities. And, less dramatically but still tragically, they are going without the small pleasures that make life worth living: a family trip to the cinema, a Friday night down the pub, a date night in the local Italian.
That is happening under his Government, because of the choices his Government has made. His comments are patently ridiculous and genuinely funny. But they are also enraging. He has revealed precisely the qualities he sought to dispel: of being profoundly out of touch.
For what it’s worth, I think it’s also utter hogwash. I grew up in the same part of the country as Sunak, at roughly the same time, in the same sort of circles. Posh kids never had Sky because the big satellite dishes were considered uncouth and working class – the urban totem of the council estate. They were indicators of low social standing, poor spending habits and cultural degeneration. Even ITV itself was considered frankly questionable.
It was the worst kind of cultural elitism, but that was the bourgeois view of the time – grounded in a suspicion of television in general and football in particular. What Sunak’s pointing to isn’t hardship. It’s snobbery.
His real mistake, however, is nothing to do with deprivation, or television, or education. It’s much more fundamental than that. It’s about authenticity.
There’s no denying the social milieu Sunak comes from. He has to own that. He cannot seriously pretend otherwise. Doing so inflicts more damage on his reputation than simply embracing it. The very obvious answer to this line of questioning is simply that he has lived a life of privilege and he wants every child in Britain to have the same good fortune. That surely should have been the response they workshopped in his preparation sessions. It’s one I suspect David Cameron would have pursued. But it’s one that was clearly beyond the wit of the current Prime Minister.
By desperately scrambling away from the obvious truth about himself, Sunak succeeded only in looking absurd, deceptive and disconnected. But on a deeper, more meaningful level, he will have confirmed to those watching that there is something decidedly untrustworthy about him – a falsity deep in the core of the image he puts across to the public.
The truth about him is this: he’s never wanted for anything, except political talent.