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Thursday 8 February 2024

Sunak - Not Waving But Drowning

He had all morning to rehearse the jibe. All that time to polish the delivery, to hone the attack line. What he did not have was the common sense, the decency, to pull it when the circumstances dictated. So on he ploughed, the delivery poor, the attack line ineffective, and in those changed circumstances utterly tone deaf. Rishi Sunak was in a hole, and still digging.


His previously delivered trans jibe went down like a cup of cold sick at PMQs yesterday because the mother of Brianna Ghey, a trans teenager murdered partly for being trans, was in the Visitors’ Gallery. Keir Starmer did not have to do so much to rub salt into Sunak’s freshly self-inflicted wound. The PM was urged to apologise. He declined. Because it was someone else’s fault.

It was? “To use that tragedy to detract from the very separate and clear point I was making... demonstrates the worst of politicshe said of Starmer. But it was Sunak who delivered the jibe about the Labour leader not being able to define a woman. Starmer merely pointed out that his opposite number had loused up again. It’s all going a bit Gordon Brown and John Major.

As in everything is bad for Sunak, all his efforts to wrest back the political initiative fall flat, and the polls are heading south. The difference with Sunak is that he is unable or unwilling to apologise when he fouls up, a recent Tory innovation brought to us by his now disgraced predecessor Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson. Then, as daytime became evening, it got worse.

The Tories put out a Party Political Broadcast. Here, Sunak was the star, his sole prop a whiteboard. But a problem soon entered: his handwriting was indecipherable, and he was unable to spell the word “mortgage”, although to be fair to him, he’s so filthy stinking rich as to not need such proletarian devices when it comes to shelling out on the next Bijou Petite Maison.

That whiteboard also had Sunak abbreviating “cost of living” to CoL. Except his scrawl was so bad, it looked like LoL. All of this in a PPB that had been pre-recorded. Didn’t anyone pick up on this? Or are the Tories now so past caring that the person involved just thought “stuff telling him, I can’t be arsed”.

Could it get worse still? Don’t ask. Business and Trade Minister Kemi Badenoch, thought of as a future Tory leader until she intervened, put out two Tweets apparently cleared with No 10. “Every murder is a tragedy. None should be trivialised by political point-scoring. As a mother, I can imagine the trauma that Esther Ghey has endured. It was shameful of Starmer to link his own inability to be clear on the matter of sex and gender directly to her grief”.

No, Sunak loused up and Starmer pointed out the lousing up. Have another go. “As Minister for Women and Equalities I've done all I can to ensure we have take the heat out of the debate on LGBT issues while being clear about our beliefs and principles. Keir Starmer’s behaviour today shows Labour are happy to weaponise this issue when it suits them”. Take the heat out? Er, no.

But at least it couldn’t get worse than that. Er, it could, couldn’t it? Certainly could. Cue John Stevens of the Mirror: “Tory Cabinet minister Laura Trott invents comments by Brianna Ghey's mum in bid to defend Rishi Sunak”. Ms Trott “told Sky News that Brianna Ghey's mum Esther had said she did not want to make her daughter's death 'about trans issues’”.


Sunak then dug himself deeper this morning with a dentist’s surgery photo-op, only for it to emerge soon afterwards that the dentist was not taking NHS patients at present. With demand for NHS dentistry, shall we say, well in excess of supply. Plus he’s still not saying sorry for lousing up yesterday.

Rishi Sunak and his pals have been well and truly rumbled, despite the cover provided by the right-leaning part of our free and fearless press, without which he and the Tories would already be history. As one Tweeter put it, “He has the emotional and cultural depth of a skid mark. All he really loves is the accumulation of money.” Meanwhile, NHS waiting lists get longer, the strikes go on, the cost of living crisis continues, while the Tories play at Culture Wars.

The only surprise is that 20% of voters still back them. Takes all sorts, eh?


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9 comments:

gillette said...

Someone on X refered to him as like an advert for half a pint of shandy. About sums him up

Anonymous said...

Big mistake here, Tim.

There's no point assuming tories of any stripe are anything other than sociopathic far right thieving shithouses. So Sunak's latest bit of disgusting malevolence is entirely in keeping with that mindset. There isn't a trace of human decency in him or any of them, blue or red.

And ultimately don't think the Starmer-Reeves version is much different. The former has broken every single promise he's made - abandoning the £28 billion Green Pledge is merely the latest. While Reeves has said her former bank employers can keep their "bonuses" (read: theft) - that's the very people who caused the 2008 Great Depression and ensuing eternal "austerity" (read: inflicted poverty).

This is just another episode in the black comic farce that is Parliament. It's a tenth rate yahboo blue/red tory faction spat, nothing more. Its only worth, if you can call it that, is to watch them picnicking on each other. In reality the Brianna Ghey tragedy means nothing to the inhuman bastards and their cheap, grubby, dishonourable careerism.

The Toffee said...

As people know (or ought to) I have no time for keef smarmer and even less for richy sunak.

But here people are, going into one about an alleged jibe at transexuals.

It just wasn't. Not sunak's fault keef can't tell what a woman is** (nor can he describe what constitutes the working class).

It was a correct observation about the shithousery and cluelessness of keef smarmer. Just so happens that the victim's mother happened to be physically present in the chamber at that time.

But, and make NO mistake, had Esther Ghey NOT been present, there wouldn't have been a dicky-bird said about sunak's quote.

And for keef to convolute the two is every bit as disgraceful as his equivocating zionism with antisemitism.

Worse than sunak's quote was that he referred to Mrs Ghey as Mrs GREY (although he wasn't the only MP to do so)

And did anyone notice the grid on reeves' as soon as keef responded to sunak? The asinine grin soon disappeared when it dawned on her what keef's response was about. Disgusting creatures the bastard lot of them

**Never heard sunak describe what a woman is either, for that matter

Anonymous said...

I am increasingly uncertain that Labour will walk this GE - a majority of no more than ten seats, I reckon or worse still, the GE of 50 years ago repeats itself. And that vile individual Badenoch will be whom Starmer faces at PMQs, assuming there's no palace coup within Labour.

Meanwhile Sunak will literally be laughing all the way to the bank.

Gary said...

I don't think Sunak made a gaffe, I think he did it very deliberately, and his refusal to apologise plays well with the Tory right, and the wider right. It was very deliberate. No accident.

There was a time when Sunak would be toast for such behaviour, but the identitarians on the right and the left have poisoned the well, so the football mentality now prevails.

The Wall Street funded astroturf DEI and ESL have done a magnificent job in agitating working class voters to vote against their interests, which has provided a rich seam for right-wing popukists to exploit.

Anonymous said...

18:53.

There'll be no "palace coup" in Quisling "Labour". There's too much to lose among the assorted far right fellow-travellers, spivs, liars and hangers-on. They'll be nodding donkeys for the rest of their worthless political lives. It's what they do. Likely there'll be a minor "controversy" - promoted by the Rothermere Daily Heil, the Murdoch Scum and broadcast media talking bots - involving one of the suburban apparatchiks, but not much more.

The Quislings will form the next government for the same reason they did in 1997: the blue tories have pushed the thieving and lying too far, as they always do. Even the most deluded morons will see it. The degree of "victory" margin is a moot point, though the result isn't.

But THIS TIME there is the knowledge of what the Quislings did last time round. After a short period of relief of being rid of the blue version, cheap sociopathic rhetoric and mass murder warmongering will be restored by the red version. Likely there will even be background cameos from deadbeat war criminal cowards like Blair, Brown, Campbell and Mandelson. In the long run we might even get a National Government as dangerously stupid and incompetent as the MacDonald treachery. Where toryism is concerned, nothing is off the table, they're quite prepared to drag everything down with them.

History will deliver its verdict in the fullness of time. It will be very unpleasant. And it is all so avoidable.

Burlington Bertie from Bow said...


Have a nice weekend, everyone!

Anonymous said...

Where did I say the palace coup would come from the Left?

Anonymous said...

13:31.

It wouldn't come from either "right" or "left". Britain is a de facto far right institutionally racist society. The current Labour Party is a symptom of it, a useful appendage. Which is why there will be no radical coup, although one Quisling might be replaced by another.