Polite Sunak is our very own public school Forest Gump
Rishi Sunak evidently wants the world to know that he has a very boring kitchen. The golden wallpaper days are over. There has been a grey revolution. Grey lamps, grey sofas, grey paint, even grey art. It would not have been a huge shock if, in the middle of the prime minister’s interview with Piers Morgan, Mrs Hinch had wandered in to wipe down the mantelpiece with a bottle of vinegar spray.
And over 40 rather unexciting minutes with Piers Morgan in the Downing Street kitchen, he even tried grey answers – though quite a few of them were somewhat see-through.
Interior designers like to say that the inside of a person’s house is the clearest window into their soul, and they might even be right. Last month Mrs Rishi Sunak, Akshata Murty, also invited Tatler magazine to have a look around, where she wisely namedropped the very high-end designers who had set to work creating what looks like a deliberately tedious masterpiece.
And that really might be the clearest window into the Sunak soul. Everyone knows there is a lot of money involved but no one can really work out how or why or what it’s all about. As he sat there doing his polite best, he looked never more like the head boy of Winchester College going through the motions of his Oxbridge interview. Not really saying anything of any interest, but never really doubting that it was all going to work out just fine.
Britain’s current prime minister appears to be a kind of public school Forrest Gump. A man who has conquered the world mainly through not knowing very much at all beyond impeccable manners, unfailing politeness and not a lot beyond the way of platitudes.
He smiled, he nodded, but at no point did he really manage to explain quite what the point of him is. A prime minister could hardly hope to be asked a question as generous as one of Morgan’s openers: “What is Sunakism? What is the doctrine?”
Morgan would be told that Sunakism is, “about people feeling proud of their country, about hope for a better future”. Within a minute he would be explaining how he’s going to amend human rights legislation to make it easier to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda.
Are these the things that make people proud of their country? The country’s prime minister doesn’t look like a man who has really thought about that very deeply.
People seem to like to say of him that he’s “out of touch”, but he doesn’t appear to be. He spoke of hearing of Liz Truss’s resignation while “taking my daughters to TGI Fridays and then to bowling”, and that is really who he is.
He might be the richest prime minister ever but he’s certainly not the poshest, or the most ridiculous. He doesn’t live in the preposterous world of Sasha Swire’s diaries. He lives in a simpler world, with simple answers. Somewhat unsurprisingly, Morgan couldn’t prevent himself from mentioning he’d also interviewed Tony Blair in this flat, who had, apparently one of those Billy Big Bass fishes on the wall, which you pressed and it sang Don’t Worry Be Happy.
Asked what Sunak’s equivalent was, he said: “It would be my wife, Akshata, who supports me so much in this job.” Wiser men might have worked out that, in the year 2023, it is not necessarily so smart to compare one’s wife to a fish who is quite literally trapped in the kitchen and who is mechanically capable of doing absolutely nothing beyond saying nice things.
Blair’s wife, one suspects, was not always at hand to do such things, because she had a successful career as a barrister to be getting on with. Sunak thinks Sunakism is about “hope for a better future”, but he is simultaneously a throwback not to a distant past but to a recent one, where some people still live, but they’re in the minority.
Does he know? Does he care? He doesn’t look to be troubled by very much at all. The main reason, by the way, that people paint their houses from top to toe in neutral colours is if they’re wanting them to sell quickly, if they were never intending to stay there for very long. It’s possible Mr and Mrs Sunak’s subconscious have had rather more of a say in the home furnishings than they realise.
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