Voices: Yes, Rishi Sunak is a record-breaker: He’s the first PM to lose a leadership contest and be in charge a month later

Another historic day, then. Is it just me, or do there seem to be a lot of them about? Do they even count as history, if you’re kind of forgetting what they’re about, even while they happen? Can any of us be absolutely sure if, in say, six months’ time, someone asks us how Rishi Sunak became prime minister, any of us will really be able to answer?

Rishi Sunak doesn’t seem to know the answer, either. He marked the occasion with an 83-second speech, staring all the while down the wrong camera, lending the occasion a kind of behind-the-scenes-of-the-latest-s***show documentary happening in real time.

Still, the little guy has certainly triumphed against the odds. Some said he would never be prime minister once rather loud questions were asked about quite where it was that his wife had been paying her taxes. Some said he would never be prime minister after he lost the contest to become prime minister, well under two months ago.

Well, here he was, silencing the doubters, the doomster, the gloomsters. Looking absolutely no one in the eye and telling them that this was his chance “to give back to the country I owe so much to.” Your words, mate, not mine.

Still, it was his second public address of the day and the first one, solely for the benefit of the people who really matter – Tory MPs – sounded like it went better, at least through the now conventional prism of desk-bang semaphore.

Say, what you like about the Tory party, it knows how to bang on a wall. And a desk. Perhaps that’s what they were trying to prove, as they returned again to their zoo enclosure in the bowels of the Houses of Parliament for one of their now regular furniture-based percussion sessions. That there is, at least something they can do. Maybe they’re hoping to put it on their CV. Proficient in surface banging, both horizontal and vertical.

The Tories have elected their second new leader in as many weeks, but if you happened to be there, all you can really say about it is that the banging was loud.

The Palace of Westminster always feels like a third-rate public school, but never more so than when the Tories are yet again back in the drama studio – or Committee Room 14, to give it its proper name.

This is where they come to kick each other out, then kick each other back in again; in what has now become a never-ending, extremely boring but very violent soap opera. Think Brookside, but directed by Quentin Tarantino.

By the time Rishi Sunak wandered in, the TV cameras and the news scribblers had already been kicked out. This was none of our business. The nation has a new prime minister, a new government, without so much as a single interview, not one public statement on any policy whatsoever. To get the plebs involved at this point? Well, that would just seem a bit vulgar, wouldn’t it?

It’s hard to know whether or not it’s for the best. Would it lower the reputation of the Tory party in the eyes of the people if there were to be video footage of its bi-monthly baboon impression?

If anything, it would improve it. The country faces immeasurable problems; most of them entirely of that party’s own making, so it would be in some ways reassuring to know that these people know how to solve them – just as long as the solution is hitting them as hard as they possibly can.

What to say about Britain’s new prime minister? He let out a little beaming smile on his way into his little moment of history. But that doesn’t tell you much – so did the last one, last month.

We live in unprecedented times, but there remains considerable uncertainty over which precedents Rishi Sunak has or hasn’t set. Is he the first ethnic minority prime minister? No, that was Benjamin Disraeli. He’s not even the shortest prime minister. That was Liz Truss, and on every possible metric (49 days, 5ft 5in).

Here is a record, though: he’s the first prime minister ever to lose a leadership contest and somehow still be prime minister a month later. That one might never be broken, and one is perhaps entitled to wonder what it might say about the calibre of the nation’s new leader.

One also wonders quite what went through Rishi Sunak’s mind as he gazed out upon his room of desk bangers – whose services he will now have to call upon in an attempt to run the country. This leadership contest has been concluded in well under a week, yet somehow at least 80 of his own MPs have managed to publicly disgrace themselves.

Two months on from declaring Boris Johnson unfit for office, at least 76 Tory MPs made it publicly clear that they want him back again. That none of the lying, none of the complete moral bankruptcy, bothers them at all. But it’s not even that.

The main reason the tide finally went out on Boris Johnson during the Chris Pincher affair is that he made so many of his underlings look stupid by making them defend the indefensible, before changing his mind himself.

Quite what, for example, James Cleverly, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Nadhim Zahawi and so many others make of having been made to look like magnificent idiots over the last 48 hours is an opinion they are likely to keep to themselves.

Even in these unprecedented times, it is hard to think that any politician has made more of a fool of themselves than Nadhim Zahawi did on Sunday. Johnson appointed him chancellor. Three months ago. Zahawi thanked him by telling him to resign for the “good of the country”. Eventually, Johnson did just that; and then, on Sunday, Zahawi breezily announced that actually, what the country needed would be for Johnson to come back again.

At 9pm on Sunday night, at the exact second The Daily Telegraph published Nadhim Zahawi’s opinion column, explaining why “Johnson 2.0” is “what the country needs”, Johnson withdrew from the contest. By 9.17pm, said column had been deleted, and Zahawi had endorsed Sunak.

It should be so very well understood by now that all who go near Johnson are damaged by him, and this is the problem our new prime minister already faces.

Back when Sunak was chancellor, three months (yet several lifetimes) ago, he liked to describe himself as a “tax-cutting chancellor”, while at the same time raising taxes. It was he who increased national insurance, claiming entirely untruthfully that it would be to pay for “a plan for social care” that didn’t actually exist.

Then we had a chancellor – Kwasi Kwarteng – who really did cut taxes, who was sacked two weeks later and all of his tax cuts were reversed by yet another new chancellor, Jeremy Hunt.

The only Truss tax cut Hunt did not reverse was the cancelling of Sunak’s national insurance rise, because that really was ridiculous. Which will mean that Sunak’s first act as prime minister will be to confirm that the main thing he did as chancellor was a big mistake.

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At the time the national insurance contribution was introduced, by Rishi Sunak, Rishi Sunak made it clear that he didn’t want to do it – Boris Johnson did. That he was a “tax-cutting chancellor” and was only raising taxes because the bigger boys made him.

Already, there is already talk that he might reverse the reversal. That is more concentric U-turns than anyone can possibly track.

Sunak, it has been repeated many times, faces the toughest challenges of any incoming prime minister. Which is true, but don’t let it be forgotten – not on day one – that he bears direct responsibility for the magnitude of most of them. He is very proud of his Brexit credentials. He’s never provided, in nigh on seven years, any economic justification for any of them. Nor will he.

He should also, frankly, just relax. He’s got two years to enjoy himself and the rest of his life to wonder why he ever bothered in the first place.