Rish! too busy wrangling unicorns to answer tricky questions
W e are now so far through the looking-glass, most of us have forgotten what reality was meant to look like. A parallel universe is the new normal. Take Rishi Sunak. A prime minister so insecure that he no longer invites lobby journalists to all his events. Just in case anyone asks him any difficult questions.
On Monday morning, the prime minister was at Business Connect, a fantasy organisation the government has invented this week to try to show it has moved on from the “fuck business” mindset of Boris Johnson, to peddle his own confusion in front of a bewildered group of business leaders and journalists. All of whom had no idea why they were there or what Rish! was hoping to achieve. Apart from putting the looking busy into business.
Mostly Sunak seemed to want to promote his own fantasy. Just recently he had launched an advertising campaign in Silicon Valley, he said. News to us. News to Silicon Valley too, I should imagine. Anyway this campaign was to rename the United Kingdom as the Unicorn Kingdom.
Yup. Forget tech startups worth $1bn or more. We have a prime minister who thinks renaming the country after an animal that doesn’t exist is a brilliant idea. Brexitland is a new imaginary country where everyone’s dreams come true. And the nuclear family is the Sylvanian Family. The Dismaland theme park has never felt so attractive. Weirdly, Sunak didn’t even look that embarrassed. That was left to his audience.
But the difficult questions couldn’t be avoided for ever. And in the Commons it was left to the junior Cabinet Office minister Alex Burghart – Jeremy Quin, the minister who usually gets landed with these thankless gigs, must have for once made himself unavailable – to answer an urgent question on the register of
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