Dishy Rishi hits a bum note with struggling musicians

Aidan Smith is considering a new career as a land and property valuer after taking the Government’s retraining quiz

The winner of this year’s Britain’s Got Talent is a 46-year-old piano-playing comedian who sang about life under lockdown.

Stuffing his songs with mentions of loo-roll shortages, Colonel Tom Moore and the line “We’ll remember that we were strong/ When Mcdonalds was closed for so very long” earned Jon Courtenay £250,000 so you could say that Covid has worked for him.

But what about those for whom 23 March was the day the music died? No gigs since, and just when it seemed as if the conversation had begun to happen about how musicians might, just might, be able to survive the pandemic, along comes a tough new crackdown.

Never mind, they can just retrain. Ditch the guitars and do something else. This seemed to be what Rishi Sunak was suggesting, to a chorus of disapproval from the arts community.

It jarred all right, not least because Sunak – Dishy Rishi, who’d gone from Mumsnet pin-up to No 10 stick-on – hadn’t previously made a misstep, unlike some of the Cabinet clodhoppers.

Denial was swift and insistent: No no, this wasn’t a disavowal of musicians or a purge on them like in Nazi Germany when books were burned. Sunak was simply stressing that no jobs were bulletproof, that new careers were something many might have to consider. Musicians, those delicate flowers, could not be excluded.

Well, he still struck a bum note. How could he have avoided this – emphasise how much he loved music, maybe reel off favourite bands? Like favourite football teams, politicians often come unstuck here, and both David Cameron (revealing how he wife Samantha liked to canoodle to the xx) and Gordon Brown (disclosing how he leapt out of bed, yanked off his Wee Willy Winkie hat and attacked each new day with the cold shower-andporridge accompaniment of the Arctic Monkeys) laid themselves open to much teasing.

Okay, so perhaps Sunak, to counter accusations of philistinism, could have conceded that while the Government’s track-and-trace system to aid the Covid struggle, along with other initiatives fanfared with much bluster and bragging, still had some way to go to reach their intended target, British musicianship was already “world-beating”. That might have helped his case.

Or, to head off Liam Gallagher dubbing him a “little t**d”, he could have emphasised the importance of music to the well-being and indeed survival of the nation during lockdown. How it lifted people’s spirits, how it stopped them going crackers, how it was their only friend. He could have included actors in this for all the telly dramas we watched during those long weeks stuck indoors, although presumably they don’t escape the possibility that they, too, might have to jack it in and seek alternative employment.

One thing Sunak definitely should have done, though, was kill the Government’s retraining quiz stone dead. It should never have got into the public domain where it’s been heavily ridiculed, by musicians and everyone else.

Have you tried it yet? I wasn’t going to enrol, thinking this might trivialise the plight of anyone actually needing to find a new career because the old one had been wiped out by Covid. But nothing trivialises this more than the quiz itself.

First off, you’re asked, or challenged: “I am comfortable telling people what they need to do.” Well,