Year in Review: A useless boy king in a disintegrating nation
One final furtive glance at an absolute bastard of a year
We all know what happened this year. There are no secret narratives here. Rishi Sunak pursued one of the most inept, irresponsible, hypocritical, cack-handed, short-sighted, tiny-hearted, micro-brained, half-arsed administrations we've seen in our lifetimes. He messed it all up. And he messed it up without a sense of dignity to preserve him or honour to credit him. That's 2023, right there. Awful person does awful things, through a procession of contradictory presentational resets, and all to no avail.
There were three key moments of the year and God help me I'm going to run through them in order.
On January 4th, the prime minister outlined his five pledges. They were all very silly things to pledge, because none of them could be guaranteed. As the Americans would say, his mouth was writing cheques that his arse could not cash. But it at least gave us a clear impression of who he wanted to be: Sunak was the technocrat prime minister, sent to clear up the mess after the children's TV catastrophe that was Liz Truss.
It didn't work, but on July 20th the Tories narrowly retained Uxbridge following a campaign centred on the London Ultra-Low Emission Zone. And from this small incident, in one byelection, over a project that would not be replicated across the country and would anyway be a hazy memory by the time of the general election, the prime minister decided to sabotage Britain's cross-party consensus on net-zero.
Suddenly, Sunak the technocrat was gone, replaced by Sunak the climate sceptic. There was a sudden splatter of announcements, some of them completely mad, some merely cynical and disingenuous: Cancelling HS2, pushing back a ban on the sale of new petrol and diesel cars, relaxing a phaseout target for new gas boilers, abandoning energy efficiency rules for landlords, and blocking a series of imaginary policies which existed only in his fevered imagination, like mandatory car sharing and the use of seven bins.
In the period between November 13th and 15th, this presentational reset was then replaced by another, and then another after that. Sunak brought back David Cameron to become foreign secretary, after getting rid of hyperventilating authoritarian Suella Braverman as home secretary. That looked like a switch back to the Tory centre-right, just weeks after he'd branded it part of a failed 30 year consensus. Then, two days later, the Supreme Court ruled that the Rwanda asylum scheme was illegal and Sunak switched back from that approach to a tooth-and-nail Brexity barbarism, in which he launched a concerted attack on the rule of law.
That's the story of the year. Reset after reset after reset, like a man trying on different wigs. Like a man who thinks of the public like a screeching bad-tempered child, and tries out one toy after another in a desperate attempt to stop it crying. Another month, another reset, followed by no movement in the polls, followed by more desperation, leading to another reset. And every time, you can sense that extra little bit of anxiety in his eyes, that disintegration of hope as the final end comes.
What's really telling is the manner in which we have ourselves degraded over the course of the year as we've watched the spectacle unfold. Those five pledges he made a year ago were tactically unsound. But they were, at the very least, based largely on improving the condition of the country. That now seems a terribly long time ago. A recent Telegraph story eagerly reported that the government was considering scrapping inheritance tax, alongside increasing the threshold for the 40p rate of income tax and reducing the 20p rate. But the first option was favoured because it was the least likely to be matched by the opposition and might therefore create a "tax dividing line".
It's remarkable that this sort of thing should be reported without a smidgen of critical appraisal. What's being proposed is the mangling and reformulation of the tax system to satisfy an election dividing line, without any assessment at all as to what the effect would be in people's lives. It is a policy machine working for electoral outcomes rather than real-world ones.
That's the world Sunak has been stuck in throughout 2023. At what point did he ever really give a shit about the impact of his proposals on the public, whether they were real ones that existed in objective reality, like Rwanda, or imaginary ones that existed in his overactive imagination, like the plot to force people to eat less cheese? At which point did he show the slightest attention to the idea that he should be acting to improve the country? It's not even a consideration. Everything he does is to survive - to get a hearing with the electorate, or motivate his base, or survive the broiling resentfulness of his parliamentary party. He operates exclusively in his own little am-dram soap opera, where the material conditions of voters are an unwelcome distraction.
It's not enough to lambast him as an individual, although that is necessary and indeed enjoyable to do. It's also crucial that we recognise the structural reasons that we've ended up where we are.
What kind of a political culture allows this man to become prime minister? He lacks any credible skills. He is strategically inept, morally empty, politically puerile and presentationally catastrophic. Sometimes arguments are made for his competence, such as the claim from Nick Robinson that he bowled over Treasury civil servants by brandishing his own spreadsheets at a meeting. Far from being reassuring, this actually highlights just how fucked we are - that mastering a spreadsheet should be considered an act of genius, or that presenting one to civil servants as a fait accompl instead of working to the department's figures would be considered in any way a sensible manner to proceed.
Sunak never faced significant scrutiny during his rise to power. He was selected as the Tory candidate for Richmond (Yorks) in 2014. These procedures are largely conducted behind closed doors, with a selection committee asking questions of the candidate,and then a hustings debate which is technically attended by the whole of the local party, but usually by a tiny subsection of it. There was never any chance of him being scrutinised during the election. Richmond (Yorks) has been a safe Tory seat for over a century. The party has a majority of 47.2%. During the leadership contest to become prime minister, Sunak didn't even have to win the support of party members - indeed he didn't. He was simply handed the position by the party in a desperate last minute scramble to limit the damage of Hurricane Truss.
Never been tested. Never been challenged. Never had to demonstrate the qualities required for the position that he holds. And now, surprise, surprise: He's not up to it. He's like Tom Hanks in Big. A headboy in grown-up's clothing, playing the role of an adult.
And yet having secured the job, there is barely any restraint on his action whatsoever. He can vandalise whatever he likes. Look at HS2. At a whim he can dismantle over a decade of tortuously constructed cross-party consensus over a major transport infrastructure project on which many of our future plans for rail and road depended, before selling off the land so that no future administration could reverse it. The failure to scrutinise those who want power is combined with a failure to restrain them once they have it.
Beneath all this, there is the journalistic failure. The entirety of this year has been spent following the trials and tribulations of the prime minister and his Cabinet. Who is up and who is down? Will Braverman challenge the leadership? Can Sunak manage the perpetual grievance culture on his backbenches? Is he being criticised by his predecessors? But how much did we read about the actual reasons that HS2 was formulated, or the consequences of scrapping it, or the breakdown in productivity in the asylum system that leads to the use of hotels?
Sunak is able to operate with extreme superficiality in his policy-making because the national political narrative also operates at that level. There's little assessment of why something works or why it doesn't, what the consequence of its reform would be, or whether it's a sensible idea. It's like trying to design a nutritious diet based on the froth in a cappuccino.
Sunak is not something that has been inflicted on our political culture. He is an encapsulation of it: empty, vacuous, superficial, lacking in coherence or consistency, inward-looking and redundant.
He was given a losing hand. It was always going to be a hard sell after 13 years pf Tory government followed by Truss. But he could have turned it around, with a canny sense of presentation and a commitment to improving the material circumstances which people faced. Had he failed, he could at least have laid claim to some nobility: to a story that would be told, sagely and wisely in later times, of how he did his best even if the weight of the moment was always balanced against him.
Now he'll lose everything: His position, his authority, and any hope of a legacy. A sad and hopeless little man, elevated far beyond his talents, who concerned himself more with his own preservation than his responsibility to the country.
He'll be forgotten the moment he is gone, like a bad dream you can only sense the outlines of come morning.
Good riddance to 2023. Bring on 2024. Things really, quite literally, can only get better.
I loathe this government on so many levels. But right now the main level is that of them salting the Earth so that an incoming labour government will be hogtied. I hope the Tories are removed from office with supreme prejudice and we never see them in power again.
There are so many things wrong with our system but ultimately it is our political culture that is at fault. It starts with the public's fixation with 'personalities' and the ridiculous idea that 'all we need is the right person in power' and all our problems will be solved. The tories have tried that five times in seven years and three times in 18 months. None has made any difference except perhaps, to make things worse.
Our system of government (democracy and constitution) are specifically designed to facilitate the 'hero leader' model but our political culture encourages popularity over competence, so what we get are vacuous, talentless, deceitful, amoral, corrupt narcissists leading parties of loyal, untalented , obedient nobodies who will go along with whatever the leader and their unelected advisors dictate.
Starmer is not like this but it's interesting to note that he is not popular, even in his own party. He is hamstrung by the need to be popular and so is everyone else who would like to change things for the better. We desperately need constitutional and electoral reform. We need to remember that that the purpose of politics is to provide ourselves with government. Government that works, that serves the needs of the nation as a whole and not the narrow interests of party supporters.
This will never happen while the British public expect to be 'entertained' by politicians as though they are voting in some kind of reality TV gameshow. It will never happen while our media a re complicit in portraying politics in the same way. People need to wake up and realise that government is completely different and far more important than 'politics'. People need to wake up, get serious about how we are governed and stop fantasising about 'sovereignty', taking back control, sunlit uplands and all the other neotenous claptrap we are consuming like witless children.
We have the politics we have created for ourselves. There's no point asking politicians to solve our problems when it's us that votes in the clowns and criminals and clodhoppers. 'Rivers of shit' is our national epitaph. Think better, behave better and demand better. Then things might change.
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