‘Meet Rishi Sunak, the necessary voice of your subsequent sat nav’

“We’re going in the right direction!” Rishi Sunak declares, while the NHS needs emergency care, the roads crumble beneath your feet, and there are actual fascists on the march.

“Ahead, bear right. No, no, further right!” he trills gleefully, as children are conscripted into the armed forces and forced to build their own barracks from three drawing pins and a piece of string that were found at the bottom of the levelling up budget.

“I’m listening,” he whispers threateningly for no apparent reason, before refusing to u-turn or recalculate the route to take in the fact everything around you is crashing and burning.

“You can trust me, all my calculations are based on independent global satellite data and the impartial Ordnance Survey,” he insists, even as satellites are falling to Earth and the OS takes out roadside billboard ads saying: “IT WASN’T US, THIS IS AWFUL, TURN BACK.”

The Prime Minister’s team is delighted with his performance at the first general election debate last night, in which he steamrollered Julie Etchingham, lied to the public, and delivered the same sort of sincerity as an AI chatbot offering automated bereavement support. The fact that such a performance was, indeed, a clear win considering, shows just how disastrous he was expected to be.

His opponent Keir Starmer got more laughs, more applause, and answered a football question correctly, but somehow is still being discussed as ‘the loser’. Why anyone thought a trained barrister would be able to make a complicated point in the 45 seconds allotted to each response is beyond me, but this wasn’t a debate – it was an audition for a TikTok, and that was about it.

These head-to-heads can make a difference, and they can make none at all. Last night’s showed only that the Prime Minister has a voice made for the Tesco self-checkout, the wannabe PM is reduced to muttering “absolute garbage” under his breath like he’s had to call the assistant over for the umpteenth time, and we’ve clearly got too much b****cks in the bagging area.

Sunak’s biggest thump was to accused Labour of planning a £2,000 tax increase over the next five years. A sum so rum that the calculator has already distanced itself from it, and that, even if true, would mean 18 million British taxpayers stumping up the horrific fee of £1.09 per day in return for 2million more NHS appointments, 700,000 dental appointments, breakfast clubs, mental health professionals, bus services, social care, support for Ukraine, teachers, 13,000 police community support officers and some green prosperity.

Sold. I’m in. A quid a day, for all that? I’m only saddened that’s NOT Labour’s plan.

It’s no wonder Starmer seemed too bemused to answer the charge. It’s about the same amount of theoretical money as Liz Truss spaffed on her mini-budget. Sunak spent three times that on the furlough scheme he keeps crowing about, and which the majority of people didn’t get.

The main risk for Sunak is not whether he will lose the election, but that if he keeps getting numbers this wrong his next job will be as a service droid. Banking wouldn’t take him on now for anything that might involve simple addition and subtraction, so he’ll have to fall back one his innate skills as a voice actor. Lifts. Train announcements. Customer service bots. If anyone needs a calm, patronising and highly-punchable voice, then Sunak is the software that will blight us for years to come.

For he is the kind of algorithm which cannot be deleted. He will persist in thinking that as the son of a pharmacist he values the NHS, even as he helicopters in and out of Harley Street. He will keep on believing that we’re lucky to have him, and that only his “bold action” in taking the “long-term decisions” are what will save us from the consequences of all his previous actions and decisions.

We’re stuck with him, with power or without. You can try to download Brian Blessed to replace him, but none of us have any hope of understanding how the circuitry works. He will by assimilated by global funds, absorbed into the world’s elite, able to change the direction of nations at a whim over dinner with some faceless billionaires. And why would he not? Everything he’s done so far was without the tiniest bit of instruction from us. He still seems to think he doesn’t need it – that he should tell us what to do, rather than the other way around.

Sack off these non-debates. You’d do better to get ready for Rishi to become a glitch in the matrix, the next mandatory voice of your sat nav, ready to drive you mad with his “clear plan” for a “secure future” that somehow ends up a fog of chaos full of screams. Don’t bother with your seatbelt. Just pray you don’t go through the windscreen before he announces: “You have arrived at your destination: A LABOUR LANDSLIDE.”