Rishi Sunak is a terrible politician.
I don't mean that he's a politician and a terrible person, although he is, but rather that he's terrible at the thing which defines him. He's a terrible politician in the way that the Cybertruck is a terrible truck, or Taylor Swift would be a terrible prop forward for the All Blacks.
The fact that Sunak ever got near the top job can, like many of the nation's problems, be laid at the feet of Boris Johnson. Johnson is an idiot and an incompetent in his own right, but he at least possesses the key talent of any narcissist: unblinking vigilance for threats to his position. Because of this, he staffed his cabinet with naifs and sycophants, blithely convinced that he would never be un-seated as long as nobody around him could steal the limelight.
When the end did come for Boris (see: idiot incompetent, above) we were left with the grab-bag of floundering mediocrities that he'd appointed, and one of them is now Prime Minister.
Rishi Sunak has to call an election by the end of the year, and the current polls suggest that he's on track to lose that election by the sort of margins that will go down in history. One poll has the Conservative Party losing 210 of their 365 seats. In simpler terms, if the Black Death swept through the Conservative party, it would be less damaging to their numbers than calling an election.
Rishi seemed content to just wait things out, presuming that poll numbers have to improve at some point. Except that next month, one of the endless after-effects of Brexit is due to make food prices rise yet again in the UK. A competent politician would have anticipated this and called an election already, so that at least a further deepening of the cost of living crisis could be blamed on someone else. Rishi Sunak, as discussed, is not a competent politician.
As if determined to underline this point, last week Rishi declared that if the Tories win the next election, (aside from pigs flying and hell freezing over and whatnot) he will seek to put an end to "sick note culture" and force anyone who is disabled or unwell to get a job.
The idea that the chronically ill are a financial burden on society is one that has some concerning precedents, as this poster from Germany in the 1930s will attest. It's informing people how much public money it costs to look after the disabled, with the implication being that maybe we could do without the disabled and perhaps there’s some way to… let’s say “eliminate”… the cost:
Rishi not understanding he's on the same side of an argument as the literal Nazis is, somehow, not the immediately striking thing about this announcement - rather, what stands out is the sheer ineptitude of it. Rishi is apparently too stupid to realise that the "thousands of people claiming benefits" that he's gunning for each have a vote, and he's just announced that if they cast it for him he's going to make their lives a lot harder. This goes beyond politically naive and into the realms of self-harm.
Thinking about this, and wondering how Sunak can possibly be this bad at his job, I arrived at a conclusion. It’s not some sort of humiliation fetish, as one might suspect, but rather a simple, obvious answer to the trivial and unrewarding mystery that is Rishi Sunak. It's just so stupid most people have probably missed it.
Fortunately, you have me, a member of the stupid, to explain the answer: Rishi Sunak thinks he's going to win the next election.
It’s ridiculous, but Rishi honestly doesn’t expect to lose. Like the Mad King of Westeros, he is watching his nation collapse, convinced that he will not die, only rise from the ashes of his palace as a dragon and consume his enemies in fire. Except that Rishi is so painfully unimaginative that he can't even fantasise about that. He probably pictures himself rising from the ashes of his kingdom as Rishi Sunak again, an outcome somehow less impressive than remaining as a pile of ashes.
This delusion is easier to understand when you remember that this is a man who has failed upwards so meteorically that he has ended up running a country. He was born wealthy. He's never had to try, or work, and he has no concept of failure because he's been insulated from it his entire life. I really don't think he can conceive a version of events where things don't work out well for him.
He has no talent as a politician, and yet he's ended up the most powerful politician in the UK. He was born with more money than he'd ever need and then married into a family with more money than everyone you know would ever need between them. Even when he fails, things work out his way. When he lost the Conservative leadership contest to Liz Truss - and I can't stress enough that people thought Rishi was a less capable leader than LIZ TRUSS - Rishi still ended up being given the job anyway. This is a man who was born on third base, and then everyone on the opposing team was stuck by lightning. Then a freak wind picked up fourth base and blew it at his head. It wouldn't surprise me at this point if Charles keels over and some kind of paperwork error puts Rishi on the throne.
Once you understand that Rishi's mind is an impenetrable fortress of obliviousness, built out of granite blocks of wealth and privilege, to the point where he doesn’t know how to pay for things in a shop, many of his decisions make sense. He’s never known what it’s like to be poor, so he can’t understand why people are poor unless they’re lazy. It explains why he’s oblivious to the fact that many of the people who can't work due to long term sickness are waiting on treatment from a health system that successive Tory governments have eviscerated. Most of all, you realise that he can look at polls that show his party is on course to take the kind of beating normally reserved for someone chasing a cartoon Road Runner, and think everything will still, somehow, work out in his favour.
As a final piece of evidence, I present this picture from a barbecue at Rishi’s house last year. Look at his face. That’s the idiot grin of a man who assumes, in spite of all evidence, that everything is going great. Because in his life, it always has.