D-Day dodger Rishi Sunak has crashed, the Conservative Party’s a wreck and the wheels are coming off the Tory campaign so they invited fresh scorn by holding a manifesto launch at Silverstone, home of the British Grand Prix.
A scrapyard would’ve proved more apt when a battered Prime Minister lacked energy, passion, vigour and perhaps even hope as he veers erratically towards July 4 when voters are destined to revoke his licence.
The record tax raiser promising tax cuts isn’t credible, workers aware that freezing Income Tax thresholds means the PM grabs with one hand far, far more than he’d ever refund in National Insurance reductions.
Sunak expecting gratitude for a supposed £17 billion is laughable after the Tories took an extra £93billion in the last Parliament.
Key public services from the NHS and schools to combating crime and filling pot holes would all pay the cost.
And that’s before we examine how he’d pay for expensive daft ideas like National Service. If deeper cuts to welfare and clamping down on tax avoidance were painless and easy they surely would’ve pursued them these past 14 years.
It was striking how sinking Sunak’s a man richer than the King with few or no answers to rebuild a better Britain from the ruins of Conservative wrecking balls.
This Tory manifesto feels the most irrelevant of 10 General Elections I’ve covered for the Daily Mirror and other media.
Silverstone reminded me of a telling mo in hapless John Major’s disastrous 1997 accident where he visited a Formula One team and was photographed next to a racing car propped up without wheels. The result then was Tony Blair’s landslide and 2024 could finish with a similar result for Keir Starmer.
The Tory fantasy manifesto reads like the fevered imagination of a Con man losing his touch so, mercifully, it is unlikely ever to see the light of day in Government.
No game changing rabbit flourished from the hat was another relief. It would’ve almost certainly developed myxomatosis.