After Prime Minister’s Questions last Wednesday, Shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper took the floor with an urgent question to the Home Secretary about her resignation and re-appointment. After the last question was asked of the Prime Minister, I saw Suella Braverman hurriedly stand from the Government front bench, and head towards the exit, walking right past the Speaker’s chair as she did.
The sitting Home Secretary fled the Commons chamber to avoid her urgent question, and thus Parliamentary scrutiny, leaving some junior minister in her place.
Her re-appointment to the job is the biggest mistake of Sunak’s premiership to date. She was forced to resign less than a month ago for insecurely emailing classified documents to backbench MPs. She has been given back the keys to the Home Office by Sunak for one very simple and transparent reason; to appease the right wing of the Conservative party, for which she has become a figurehead, giving the false, by desired impression of party unity.
This is now normal behaviour for this Government. Displays of blatant cowardice are now so commonplace that they no longer warrant outrage from the public or the media, which means something somewhere has gone very wrong.
The Home Secretary is not the only culprit; during PMQs, the new Prime Minister Rishi Sunak dodged a legitimate question from Kier Starmer about a further windfall tax on the ridiculous profits of energy giants by bringing up Starmer’s previous support for Jeremy Corbyn.
Regardless of the fact Corbyn hasn’t been in frontline politics for years, and is no longer a Labour member, even the least astute political observer can see the Labour Party has changed significantly since Corbyn’s premiership.
If Starmer had brought up Sunak’s support for Boris Johnson, an even more destructive and irresponsible leader than Corbyn, then perhaps such a response would make sense. However, Sunak clearly just wanted to avoid the topic by bringing up a popular but wholly irrelevant right-wing talking point.
Sunak seems to be drawing straight from the Johnsonite PMQs playbook, avoiding scrutinising questions by attempting to smear Starmer with outdated and irrelevant talking points. To me, this is exactly the same as Braverman fleeing from Yvette Cooper; Sunak doesn’t want to respond to scrutiny, so he just deflects and smears and passes blame.
I was slightly hopeful that he would try to bring some dignity and accountability to the sitting Government, answer legitimate questions with straight answers, and subject himself and his cabinet to a little more Parliamentary scrutiny. I was wrong.
Even the principle of Sunak’s appointment as Leader smacks of cowardice. He is the second Prime Minister without a mandate that has been raised into No. 10, and like Truss before him, will enforce great change which the British people haven’t voted for.
If the Conservatives actually cared about democracy and accountability as concepts, they would have called a general election the moment Truss resigned. But, predictably, they have chosen party over country, and are running scared of the electorate to try and preserve their majority.
The Prime Minister before Sunak was just as craven as her successor; Liz Truss also avoided scrutiny with progressively weaker excuses, hanging desperately to the threadbare credibility of her predecessor to make herself seem more responsible.
She did not appear for lengthy interviews, her exchanges with the media never running more than twenty minutes. Whilst shorter interviews are more digestible for the public, more detailed, longer format interviews allow for greater scrutiny, and allow politicians to give more detail on their policies and views.
Truss was not a skilled orator, nor did she ever seem comfortable under questioning. The decision to avoid longer interviews was made to maintain Truss’s credibility with the public (however weak it may have been), and again showcases the Conservative’s aversion to proper scrutiny.
Truss also famously failed to appear for her own urgent question in the Commons: Kier Starmer asked the then-Prime Minister to explain her decision to fire the then-Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng in the midst of the economic fallout of the “mini budget”. She left the Leader of the House Penny Mordaunt to answer the questions, who performed markedly better at the dispatch box than Truss could ever hope to (including spawning a few hilarious sound bites, including “the Prime Minister is not under a desk”).
Truss’s decision to fire Kwarteng was in itself a cowardly act. The calamitous “mini budget” was apparently developed with the PM and her Chancellor in lock-step, and was voted for by all those who supported Truss’s leadership bid.
If all of those responsible for the deep and lasting damage done by the “mini-budget” took responsibility, Truss would have resigned alongside Kwarteng, in lock-step. It’s not as if less time in office could have made her look worse.
Her entire premiership post-“mini budget” was characterised by her running from the consequences of her own policies, dodging blame for as long as was possible, and when the time finally came for her to resign in disgrace, she uttered not one word of apology.
She didn’t even have the backbone to call the First Ministers of Scotland and Wales during her miserable forty-four days in office, presumably too scared of the difficult conversations that would have ensued.
Perhaps the embodiment of Tory cowardice was the Prime Minister before Truss, Boris Johnson. The examples of his gutlessness are too many to list in one paragraph, but the most obvious and most egregious example is of course Partygate.
Johnson was not brave enough to give up the luxuries of pre-pandemic times, and enjoyed cheese and wine in his garden while the virus spread, and partied long into the night while people died. He lied and dodged and sidestepped and deflected for months on end to avoid the consequences of his actions, petrified of losing his power. He didn’t resign until two thirds of his government turned on him for telling them to lie as well.
He wanted to return to power, but didn’t have the support of enough MPs to run. In a letter after he pulled out, he claimed he had the support of one hundred and two MPs, but when added to the numbers Sunak and Mordaunt claimed to have, they don’t add up. He was scared of losing face when his base discovered he didn’t have the support of MPs after the walking cataclysm that was Liz Truss, and so lied about it, like normal.
Either that, or he did have the numbers, and was too scared to go up against Sunak. He doesn’t care about party unity; he spent the first few years of his premiership ripping it in half with Brexit, and the latter ones doing the same with the endless scandals. He pulled out either because he knew Sunak would rinse him in a leadership contest, or he just wasn’t popular enough.
But the obvious elephant in the room when it comes to Conservative cowardice is (drumroll please) Brexit.
I am as sick of talking about Brexit as I am about Johnson, but its still a huge, huge problem. There hasn’t been a government in Stormont for months, inflation and interest rates are dire compared to the Eurozone, and our prospects on the international stage are bleak outside of the EU. Public consensus has now been firmly against Brexit for the past four or five years, but the Tories still sell Brexit like its going out of fashion.
They are too afraid to admit what the rest of us have already known for a good while now; that Brexit was an awful mistake. More and more Tories speak publicly of re-joining the single market, and there is growing discussion now around re-joining entirely.
If they admit to this mistake, they will never win another election. They are right to be scared. I suppose any politician on either side of the aisle would be shaking in their boots in the position the Tories currently are currently in. We can, however, take comfort in the fact that a growing number of the 2019 intake of Tories are starting to speak out about their disillusionment with politics after Johnson, and Truss, and Sunak, and wish to change careers. Who can blame them.
On Rishi Sunak’s appointment, whilst I and the rest of the British public would have preferred a general election, Sunak is a better choice than Truss or Johnson (although the bar set by his predecessors was as low as it could be).
His South Asian heritage is not to be overlooked. It is a remarkable leap forwards for our country that he has been appointed Prime Minister, and seeing a British Asian holding the keys to No. 10 is something we should all be proud of. The fact that ethnicity and faith has become almost a non-issue when it comes to our politicians shows how far we have come since our imperial days, and we are well on the way towards our political system being entirely representative of our populace.
However, his first few days in the job show that his policies and attitude will be painfully similar to his predecessors. His premiership will be just as opaque, just as deaf to the wishes of the people, and just as craven as we have come to expect from the Tories.
Sunak is a more credible leader than past Tory PMs, and will be more popular with voters no doubt. He will give Kier Starmer a run for his money at the dispatch box and at the polls, but in the end, I don’t think Sunak can save his party. The damage is done, and the people won’t forget what his predecessors did.
Happy Halloween
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