‘Rishi Sunak’s election technique: issues can solely worsen’

He’s tried being reliable. He’s rebranded. He’s even offered renewal, by pretending he’s just pitched up in the middle of someone else’s drama.

In less than two years, Rishi Sunak has cycled through every soap opera stock character from faithful old retainer to edgy, over-pierced teen, with the only return for his troubles being an increase in the number of people switching off.

Today his ‘political journey’ sees the Prime Minister do the equivalent of ripping off his pinny, dashing out of Roy’s Rolls, and running down Coronation Street screaming: ‘ALIENS! FLESH-EATING ALIENS! THEY’RE COMIN’, I SEEN IT IN A DREAM!’

The man presiding over the dog days of a corrupted government, a necrotising party, and a nation so potholed even Old Trafford is in danger of collapse, has claimed that things can only get worse.

Of course he’s right. The Earth’s magnetic poles could suddenly switch, we could fall screaming into the face of the Sun, Liz Truss could take over Jurgen Klopp’s job and turn Liverpool into a sink hole that empties the Irish Sea. But it’s unlikely, considering.

The fact of the matter is that any party – and we might well be saying the same of Labour in another 15 years’ time – that has been in power too long gets lazy. They start to feel entitled, untouchable, and like fiddling this or diddling that is their sovereign right as lords and masters of all they survey. They forget there is a performance review, and that when it comes to scornful defenestration, the British electorate makes a chat with Claude Littner seem as threatening as tea with a teddy bear that’s lost its stuffing.

It is this attitude which makes end-of-era politicians jump the shark, and do something so outrageously bonkers they’ve lost the audience. When it happened with a half-blind day-trip to Barnard Castle while the nation was locked in its house, it was hard to think they could possibly do anything more stupid. But then there was tractor porn, an unethical ethics advisor, illegal dancing, party investigations by a civil servant who’d organised his own party, and the sort of unwanted sexual shenanigans that even Eurovision would hesitate to broadcast. Not so much jumping the shark, as having a piss-up in an aquarium.

What Britain wants most is a bath, and to forget Matt Hancock ever existed. It will settle for a cleansing trip to the ballot box and a vague hope for a return to grown-up scandals about selling peerages and getting a researcher knocked up. But Sunak has decided that he knows better, and what people want most is to be terrified that he won’t be in charge any more.

This is like your jungle guide warning you to stay behind him, even as he sinks past his ears in quicksand. Or a narcoleptic bus driver refusing to let his passengers leave. “I have bold ideas,” Sunak declared in a speech, like Baldrick just before the whistle blows in a First World War trench.

“Almost every aspect of our lives is going to change,” he warned, without grasping that for the 99.9995% of the country who are not Conservative MPs, that would be more welcome than a lottery win. “I feel a profound sense of urgency,” he opined, gazing meaningfully at the back of the room even as the fuse on the stick of dynamite Bugs Bunny handed him fizzles down to nothing. “More will change in the next five years than in the last 30,” he said to the Labour poster-writers, who chortled and turned it into a meme.

Throw on top of it the fact his party’s most successful act in the past week has been to point out one of their MPs tried to rig a trial for sex assault, then lobbied the Lord Chancellor for softer pillows in prison, and that they waited four years to mention it publicly, and we have a government that should be rebadged as the Royal National Institute for the Wilfully Myopic.

Pointing out that Natalie Elphicke defected to Labour with a lot of immoral baggage related to her husband’s criminality not only reminds the voters he was, as he said, “a naughty Tory”, but that they were happy to host the dodgy duo before and after the electorate knew what those in charge already did. Only the truly blinkered would think sitting on mud before flinging it wouldn’t make you look mucky.

The problem with being negative about what will happen if one side loses is that it doesn’t make anyone dream about winning. Blair swept to power in 1997 saying things would only get better; Obama did it a decade later by saying yes we can; and while it may have turned out badly, in 2019 Johnson got a landslide with get Brexit done. Positivity works wonders even when it shouldn’t, while doom-mongering stamps on optimism and turnout.

Perhaps that’s Sunak’s secret weapon: convincing voters to stay at home come polling day, in the hope that the three Tories left will sweep him back to Downing Street. Even the dog knows that telling us how rich we should all feel ain’t working, especially when it’s accompanied by a cheery wave from a man in a helicopter.

But without a dream being sold to us, this is all we’ve got. Which is why it’s time for Keir Starmer to lay out the stall those defectors will never stand behind: the big ideas that can get a nation believing renewal is possible, even after a train comes off the viaduct and takes out half the cast. At the moment Sunak’s doing a grand job of destroying himself, but it won’t be long before the voter turns to look at Starmer and says, all right mate, what have you got?

Policies, competence, and – even if it’s only temporary – a sense of social responsibility would be nice. But until then, anything is better than watching a Prime Minister slowly losing his tiny mind.