Sunak Strikes Back as he’s asked the most important question of all
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“On the first day of Christmas my true love sent to me, Rishi Sunak at committee!”
Liaison to be specific; on the last day of the parliamentary term to be exact - and the PM looked tired as he faced the various committee chairs. Perhaps he was kept up by the noise from the traditional kiddies’ party at No11 the night before? My sources say it included a disco, a magician with a rabbit and a visit by Father Christmas - upstaged by the Chancellor’s dog, Poppy, who probably thought the rabbit was for her.
That festive spirit trickled into the Liaison, with Alicia Kearns in Christmas tree green, Diana Johnson wrapped in tartan, and Liam Byrne channelling the ghost of Charles Dickens (as the sketch writer Bill Cash remembers most fondly).
Would it have killed Byrne to ask the PM what he’s doing for his holidays? Instead, he moaned that “sales of luxury cars and private jets are at an all-time high”, while “food banks are running out of food” - so what are you going to do about it, Mr Sunak? Maggie Thatcher would’ve said “retrain the poor as air stewards and limo drivers”, but each PM has their style and Rishi’s is to reject a false premise.
Byrne complained that the capital gains tax set-up is unfair. But it was Gordon Brown who cut it, noted Rishi, and “you were in the Treasury at the time!” A cynic might add that all these questions about inequality sounded suspiciously like the blurb for Byrne’s new book, The Inequality of Wealth, which hits the shelves soon. If committees are just an opportunity to plug a forthcoming title, then at least when Nadine Dorries was an MP we were guaranteed a saucy excerpt from The Life and Loves of a Chambermaid.
“Do you consider yourself a leader on the global stage?” asked Sarah Champion. In a galaxy far, far away, a shrimp-headed monster cried: “It’s a trap!”
Had Rishi replied “yes”, he’d have sounded like a narcissist. When he instead waffled about teamwork and aspirations, he appeared parochial. This is Labour’s script for 2024: moral posturing rather than policy, contrasting “mean” Tories with “virtuous, visionary” lefties, while refusing to say how anything will be paid for - or the borders protected.
Is it true, asked Johnson, that you haven’t yet found a commercial airliner willing to fly refugees to Rwanda? The PM indicated that he’s optimistic about doing so. Let us hope it’s not Wizz Air, for then the illegal aliens will truly never get off the ground.
After 90 minutes, not all of them I spent awake, the chair wished the PM “a very merry Christmas” and sent him on his way. In the corridor, Rishi was stopped by a little boy in a Darth Vader jumper who asked him the most important question of all, strangely forgotten by the grownups: “What, sir, is your favourite Star Wars movie?”
His answer? “The Empire Strikes Back”, of course - cos that’s what all the geeks go for. Incidentally, the best way to wind up a geek is to say “I prefer the Phantom Menace”, and wax lyrical about the “hilarious” Jar Jar Binks.
“Meesa wishes all readers a-Happy a-Christmas-is!”
