Repeating the same mistakes is Sunak’s special flaw
The things that Rishi Sunak is doing are so stupid they defeat our capacity to define them with words. We’ve surely never seen anyone manage this degree of predictability in their errors. It’s like watching a man dig a pitfall, crawl his way out of it, cover it up with branches, apply a blindfold to his face, and then walk right into it.
The Prime Minister has made Jonathan Gullis deputy chair of the Conservative Party. If that rings a bell, it’s because it’s the same error he made a year ago, was punished for and has now decided to repeat again, step by tortured step.
In February 2023 he made Lee Anderson vice-chair. Anderson was lacking in gravitas or common decency. His notoriety rested solely on his near-Olympian levels of ignorance.
Why would anyone pick someone like that for a senior position in the oldest and most successful democratic party in the Western world?
The answer was simple and depressing. Sunak thought Anderson represented the reactionary, tells-it-like-it-is pub bore who, the Prime Minister imagines, populates the kinds of constituencies that Sunak would never set foot in unless he had to.
It’s drivel of course, but then Sunak has no personal experience of these voters. He simply responds to the caricature of them which exists in his mind.
Anderson also worked as a symbolic olive branch to the right of the Tory parliamentary party, an attempt to reassure them that Sunak was one of them.
Anderson behaved like a gorilla in a greenhouse, smashing things whenever he turned around, angrily beating his chest and trying to show how loathsome he could be, for instance by telling asylum seekers to “f**k off back to France”.
Then he quit in protest at an amendment to the Rwanda bill, was stripped of the whip for blatant Islamophobia, and went off and joined the Reform party.
Sunak could have learned several important lessons from this debacle. The first is not to promote people like this. The second is that you cannot placate the lunatic fringes of the right. And the third is not to denigrate your own political institution by handing seniority to people who demonstrably do not deserve it. It will merely reduce it in the eyes of voters and raise questions about your own professional standards.
Sunak evidently failed to learn a single one of these lessons, because he has made the same exact mistake with Gullis. People first took notice of Gullis when videos of him during parliamentary debates went viral. They showed him braying and shouting, more akin to a zoo exhibit than a parliamentarian.
He said reports about Covid deaths were a “sick obsession”, a statement for which he later apologised. He said Black Lives Matter was a “Marxist organisation that wants to abolish the nuclear family”. He said that anyone who used the phrase “white privilege” should be reported to a counterterror programme and that teachers who criticised the Conservative Party should be sacked.
But again, this is why Sunak gave him the position. So the same feeble thought process takes hold once more. He can represent the “Red Wall” voters. He can reassure the right of the parliamentary party that they are being heard.
Perhaps Sunak will be lucky. Perhaps his political expiration in the general election will come so quickly that Gullis won’t have the time to say anything particularly dreadful. Or perhaps Gullis will somehow manage, in the short time available to him, to say something so obviously intolerable, or behave in such a patently unacceptable way, that Sunak will be forced into the same position he was in with Anderson.
And then we’ll go through the same process all over again – stripping the whip, sending out ministers to insist that what he said was wrong even if they won’t explain exactly why, and then watching him flounce off to join Reform.
Sunak has so many flaws it’s hard to do them all justice. But when they come to write his political obituary, historians will give special place to his ability to repeat the same mistake he only just made all over again, while seemingly hoping that it’ll all work out differently this time.
Why would anyone pick someone like that for a senior position?