Rishi Sunak’s Agonising Slow-Motion Crash

Photo by Liubomyr Vovchak on Unsplash

Liz Truss’ mercifully brief time masquerading as prime minster was a rapid car crash. Floundering Rishi Sunak’s crash is in agonising slow-motion — but could do even more damage.

After years of Tory-driven political chaos, we have been saddled with four increasingly inept prime ministers since 2019, and a cascade of bottom-of-the-barrel ministers. Rishi Sunak scraped under the bottom of the sticky barrel to dredge up Dominic Raab as Deputy Prime Minister and Secretary of State for Justice and Lord Chancellor, along with others who are not fit for public office.

Since the EU membership referendum in 2016, the parliamentary Conservative Party has haemorrhaged much of the experience and political intelligence it had. Many of the experienced, reasonably moderate and semi-rational people were forced out by a rabid mob of hard-right Brexiteers. By the time Boris Johnson had taken over from Theresa May, the party was looking more like a brattish bunch of Lord of the Flies thugs than a dignified group of decent, responsible and coherent politicians.

Since then, we have had Liz Truss, who tried speeding up the hard-right neoliberal agenda and sunk the economy, which led to another leadership election — and we then ended up with Rishi Sunak and the miscreants who managed to cling onto him. Some of the most appalling and toxic…