The prime minister has chosen to pick a fight with the nurses – a battle he’s never going to win
Week after week, Sunak gets dismantled by Keir Starmer.Last modified on Wed 18 Jan 2023 22.15 GMTishi Sunak is the incredible shrinking man. The more you see of him, the less there appears to be. When he became prime minister, he had the appearance of a moderately successful – if rather over-eager – tech bro, brought in to save the Conservative party from itself. But that was a chimera. Because Rish! isn’t even that successful.
Sunak is dying a slow death. Nowhere more so than at prime minister’s questions. Week after week, he gets dismantled by Keir Starmer. Practice makes imperfect. His backbenchers try to lift his spirits with Operation Confirmation Bias. AKA cheering enthusiastically every time Rish! says something intellectually incoherent. It’s most disarming. Nor can he still claim to be a newcomer to the job. Even if his MPs don’t demand more, the country does.
Sunak looked totally bewildered. Even though ambulance response times had made the front pages of every paper for weeks. Instead of trying to give a sensible answer, instead of trying to appear emotionally intelligent by showing he cared about the state of the NHS, he just went for the easy putdown. Or what he thought was the easy putdown. It was all the fault of Labour. Even though it hadn’t been in government for well over a decade.
Cue more defensive froth. It was worse in Wales, said Rish!. Great news for Stephanie, who could have chosen to die there instead. Starmer was just playing party politics. Mmm. There was only one person playing party politics and it wasn’t the Labour leader. Another plug for his anti-strike laws which even his own advisers believed will make a bad situation worse. Shouts that Starmer had broken his promises. From a prime minister who had never made a promise he had kept.