'Desperate Rishi Sunak gambles future of our planet just to cling on to power'

23 September 2023 , 19:23

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Rishi Sunak hopes to cling on to power a little longer (Image: Getty Images)

If ever you saw a week that made you want a general election, this was it. I mean, seriously. Let’s get it over with, can we?

This really can’t go on much longer. I suppose the Tories have some interest in dragging it out. There is the slim hope of a proper economic recovery, I suppose, which may improve their election chances.

The more mundane reality is that it gives a lot of people a few more months in a well-paid job. Meantime, the rest of us suffer. Mr Sunak’s performance this week was quite something. He had the air of a man who knows the game is up. The trouble is, as I’ve mentioned before, the more desperate this lot get, the more dangerous they are.

The country has lost faith in its Government and particularly its Prime Minister

The top lines of Mr Sunak’s intervention involved him reneging on net-zero promises. It is quite something that he would be prepared to gamble the future of the planet to try and cling on a bit longer. It got the condemnation it deserved. From pretty much everywhere. Using the environment as some sort of culture war issue is – and this is an understatement – a bit much.

It even annoyed the Speaker, who rightly pointed out that announcements of this magnitude – of planetary importance –should have been chewed over a little bit by Parliament first. Still, never mind. It is to be expected at this late juncture. Desperate people do desperate things, etc. This is similar to how Boris Johnson behaved at the end, and Liz Truss at the start, just flailing around.

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No plan, just action. It doesn’t work. Mr Sunak’s intervention was one of the strangest I’ve ever seen. I was watching it idly, when he said something about scrapping a “meat tax” that made me sit up and listen. A meat tax?

I have the same diet as one of those things that follows lions round the Serengeti, only with more Guinness, and I hadn’t heard about a meat tax. I would have been Guy Fawkesing it, let me tell you. Turns out there was no meat tax. He had cancelled something that didn’t exist. He did the same a bit later when he said that none of us would have to use seven different bins for our recycling. No one has seven different bins. They never have. Not even Snow White.

Anyways, it’s getting silly now. It’s over. The country has lost faith in its Government and particularly its Prime Minister. The latest opinion polls show Mr Sunak has a record unfavourability rating of something like -23, according to YouGov. That’s a lot less favourable than Keir Starmer. In fact, it’s a popularity rating similar to that of double maths, Millwall Football Club and Ebola. And who would vote for any of that?

Keir Mudie