Voices: Rishi Sunak wants an ‘honest conversation’ – but doesn’t want an honest answer

Rishi Sunak bounded on stage to tell the watching crowds that it was time to have “an honest conversation about where we are, and how we got here”.

He’s right. It is indeed time for honesty. He probably knows that the guy he did more than anybody else to kick out of 10 Downing Street had to go because he couldn’t tell the truth. And not just because he couldn’t stop lying, but because other people then had to lie for him. Like the prime minister’s official spokesperson, having to apologise in person to the dozens of journalists it was his taxpayer-funded job to brief, every day, for knowingly lying to them for months.

So it’s disappointing that Sunak’s own team spent the build-up to his launch event telling journalists from certain publications that the event was full, and telling others from, say The Daily Telegraph, that there was still plenty of space to attend. And if he wants to have an honest conversation about “where we are and how we got here” then here is just one small vignette on the subject of “where we are”.

One minute’s walk around the corner, Kemi Badenoch was also launching her bid to become prime minister. “I will focus on people’s priorities, not Twitter’s priorities,” she said. And just outside the room in which she was speaking, a member of her campaign team had scribbled the words “Men” and “Ladies” on pieces of white paper, then cut them out and stuck them on the toilet cubicle doors.

This, frankly, is as normal as the next few days are going to get. Kemi Badenoch is campaigning hard on banning gender-neutral toilets, and evidently feels like two bits of scrap paper sellotaped to the toilet doors is going to somehow make her look less stupid not more.

So, how did we get here? Well, there’s a one-word answer to that: Tories. When everything’s broken and everyone hates each other, that’s always the answer. How did we get to the point, for example, where Kemi Badenoch is standing on stage, having a go at “companies like Ben and Jerry’s, who care more about social justice than productivity and profit”?

(That will, of course, be the same Ben & Jerry’s whose founders, Ben and Jerry, somehow knew enough about productivity and profit to sell their one-time kitchen table company to those notorious social justice warriors Unilever for a touch under three hundred million quid.)

How did we get here, with leading politicians shouting at ice cream companies, with whom they’ve still got unresolved issues for having criticised their plans to install high-powered wave machines in the English Channel in order to drown asylum seekers before they can make landfall?

Sunak, for his part, had come to praise Boris not to bury him. He had, he said, “a warm heart”. He praised his “remarkable achievements”, like “breaking the Brexit deadlock” via a Brexit deal he’s even now trying to break the law to overturn. And it’s disappointing to have to go through this stuff again, especially when the subject matter is the guy Sunak personally terminated, but it’s not immediately clear how warm a heart you have to have to connive in a court case to cover up the existence of one of your own children.

He had pre-prepared digs for the rest of the field, naturally. Dominic Raab was on hand to talk about Rishi Sunak’s vast experience, and point out that, “now is not the time to learn on the job”, a point that you just think might have carried more weight had it not been made by a man who was foreign secretary before he found out where France was.

It’s a striking self-own in so many ways. Rishi Sunak became chancellor at the start of a global pandemic and within weeks had delivered about nine Budgets and spent hundreds of billions of pounds on a furlough scheme that even his most fervent critics would consider a success. On Sunak’s own logic, he should simply have turned the job down.

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Meanwhile, Nadine Dorries and Jacob Rees-Mogg wandered out of cabinet to stand in Downing Street and give their backing to Liz Truss. Truss was the keenest Brexiteer in the field, Rees-Mogg said. She had done more than others in helping him find “Brexit opportunities,” he added. A few weeks ago Rees-Mogg published a list of “Brexit opportunities” he had found in The Sun newspaper, on which number one was “more powerful vacuum cleaners”, so if Liz Truss was the secret brains behind this, it’s hard to imagine how you might damn anyone more with even fainter praise.

(And just an aside, it remains highly unclear whether anyone at all will bother to manufacture Britain’s new high-powered vacuums which would be against regulation in almost every other global market. James Dyson has been entirely silent on the subject, perhaps aware that, having backed Brexit and then moved his entire business to Singapore, he might look more than a little bit stupid. He also recently abandoned plans for an electric car on the grounds that it was not “commercially viable”. One suspects the sums on Jacob Rees-Mogg’s imaginary British mega-hoover may also not quite add up.)

The main part of Rishi Sunak’s honest conversation was not to promise radical undeliverable tax cuts, like everybody else, but it didn’t stop him from describing his recent changes to the national insurance threshold as the “biggest tax cut ever”, which it isn’t. And for anyone who earns more than about £35,000, it was, in fact, not a tax cut at all but a tax rise. But Tory voters are notoriously low earners who’ll no doubt be fine about it.

So, this is where we are: still very much in the land of make-believe. And how did we get here? Through the fantasy politics and the fantasy economics of Brexit and the time-honoured delusions of Tories. Rishi Sunak is certainly right that it is time for an “honest conversation” about how we got here. It’s just that one suspects it’s an honest conversation the public will have at the ballot box in about two years’ time. And he might not like their honesty very much at all.