Rishi Sunak let his youngsters down lengthy earlier than final week’s P-word activist

THE WORD is Westminster is that Rishi Sunak will be in his California penthouse by the weekend.

Time and again the PM has rejected claims he’ll quit the UK if he loses Thursday’s election. So expect him to quit the UK when he loses Thursday’s election.

The man who makes it up as he goes along is becoming ever more desperate as he runs out of road with no Jude Bellingham to save him.

Enter Nigel Farage.

The Reform UK leader and weapons-grade narcissist rivals Sunak in the lack of self-awareness stakes. Both mens’s record on racism returned to haunt them last week.

Farage – who’d accused the PM of not understanding “our culture” last month – expressed incredulity after Reform campaigner Andrew Parker was shown to have called Sunak the racially offensive P-word in an undercover video.

“I saw the footage and I thought: ‘No-one speaks like that!’ said Farage, the man who in 2014 defended the use of the racially offensive term ‘ch**ky’ to describe Chinese people.

Perhaps he’d forgotten the time he claimed, in 2013, that some Muslim immigrants are ‘coming here to take us over’.

Or the time, in 2014, he agreed with the ‘basic principle’ of Enoch Powell’s Rivers of Blood speech.

Or when, that same year, he told a radio station he feels ‘uncomfortable’ hearing foreign languages on the Tube.

Other than that, who does talk like that?

Well, there was Robert Blay, the former candidate of Farage’s now-defunct UKIP party. Blay said in 2015, that he wanted to shoot dead his Tory opponent so no Asian would ever be PM.

Farage has threatened to sue a vetting firm after it failed to weed out parliamentary candidates with extremist views, yada, yada, yada.

But those candidates do tend to gravitate towards him, don’t they?

Farage has maintained his party line that Parker, the guy from last week, is an actor – which is true. But lots of actors use their influence to support their politics – they don’t use racially offensive language.

Parker’s insulting description of Sunak was reprehensible. This column has zero love for the hardship the PM has caused millions of families and industries across the UK.

Or the increasingly divisive, damaging xenophobic politics he has espoused.

But I’d defend any person of colour, even him, against being judged on the colour of their skin.

‘P***-bashing’ – racist thugs targeting random Asians in the street – really was a thing in the seventies and eighties.

It made the lives of men and women a nightmare. Teenage boys and girls walking home from school went through hell. Some lost their lives.

The P-word insult carries a generational trauma others may never fully understand. Even now.

Yes, things have changed since then. But the fear has always remained that the racist, xenophobic culture fostered by the Tories – indistinguishable, at times, from the National Front and the British National Party – would embolden the language we hear now.

And here we are.

“It hurts,” Sunak said on Friday.

Not as much as it hurt the millions of people and their families dehumanised by his rhetoric for coming to this country for a better life – just like his own parents.

Sunak invoked his daughters as he rightly condemned Parker’s remarks.

Yet what would his girls have made of their dad’s weak, dragging of his heels to speak after Tory MP Lee Anderson’s claimed in February that London Mayor Sadiq Khan had “given the capital city away” to “his mates” whom he described as “Islamists”.

What will Sunak’s girls will say when they find their dad still takes money from Tory donor Frank Hester – who claimed Diane Abbott should be shot dead and insisted seeing the Labour MP made him want to hate all Black women?

What will Sunak’s daughters do when they come across his “joke” that people complimented his “tan” while out on the campaign trail?

Or the time their dad actually backed former Home Secretary Suella Braverman when she claimed “vulnerable white English girls” where at risk from “British Pakistani men” when official Home Office statistics state child grooming gangs “are most commonly white”.

What will Sunak’s girls do when they search for their father’s furious response to his predecessor Boris Johnson’s women wearing the Burqa as “letterboxes” – and find nothing.

Because the truth is, Sunak surrendered his integrity on racism years ago. His record stinks.

Now he pretends to care because he is haemorrhaging disillusioned voters to Reform and he needs to stop the bleeding. His faux emotion is political opportunism.

A cynic would suggest his daughters must be tired of being used to evoke empathy. Remember last year when the claimed they were “the experts of [climate change] in my household”, insisted they championed reducing energy usage – then produced a net zero u-turn?

What he should be feeling as he calls in the removal men this week is a sense of shame that he let his daughters down to appease the racists who now have no more use for him.

Because when you blow the dog whistle, how can you surprised when the dogs start barking?