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What is it with Rishi Sunak and women? I mean, I’m sure he is a lovely husband and a marvellous dad to his daughters. But there were four women at yesterday’s liaison committee, and during a 90-minute grilling, the prime minister got snippy with them all.
Sunak turned up in his spectacles and narrow tie, the very image of a dull technocrat who could roll off facts and figures on any subject thrown at him. In other words, he was playing himself. He is actually pretty good at these sessions, the committee being easily snowed by long techie answers that gobble up the available time.
First questions went to Harriett Baldwin, the Conservative chair of the Treasury committee, who asked mildly: “How is the economic strategy going?”
Sunak claimed to be “making progress” on all of his five pledges, including his commitment to “grow the economy”. This was not strictly true, because the UK is still technically in recession until at least 10 May, when fresh quarterly figures come out. But in Sunak-speak, being “in recession” counts as “making progress” on growth.
Baldwin tackled him on another pledge that he reckoned to be making progress on, which was to “get debt falling”. She pointed out it is, in fact, “rising every year”.
Sunak dismissed her, saying debt will fall next year. Baldwin pointed out it had risen every year, only to be batted aside as he mansplained his version of the economy. Before accepting Sunak’s truths as reality, it is worth recalling that the head of the OBR called the forecasts a “work of fiction” because ministers have declined to reveal the spending cuts required to meet them.
Baldwin pushed him, but Sunak just kept denying her points with a look of irritation, like a company PR man fielding an annoying pensioner shareholder at the AGM.
The next woman to quiz the prime minister was Labour’s Dame Diana Johnson, chair of the Home Affairs Committee. No shrinking violet, Johnson baited him about his Rwanda deportations bill, asking: “Do you have an airline to fly people to Rwanda, or will you use the RAF?” Sunak refused to answer, citing commercial sensitivities.
When Johnson pressed him on this and other questions, Sunak glowered, blathered and started simply talking over her. Less than an hour into the session and we were seeing Snippy Rishi, the prime ministerial alter ego, a thinner-skinned and more irritable doppelganger of that nice chap in the Eat Out To Help Out ads.
Things got tetchier when the Scottish National Party’s fearsome Joanna Cherry took over the interrogation. Was the PM “proud” that Pakistan was citing his Rwanda policy to justify deporting vulnerable Afghans? Sunak bridled: “I’m obviously not responsible for the comments of another country.”
Cherry, needling him, asked he was “proud” to have rejected an exemption from Rwanda flights for Afghans who worked with UK forces.
Sunak tartly responded: “I really disagree with that characterisation… which is deeply unhelpful.”
The pair then talked over each other until chair Sir Bernard Jenkin scolded Cherry for interrupting the PM. She was delighted: a perfect TikTok moment.
Was it my imagination, but Sunak was asked a lot of tough and tricky questions, including some real bruisers from Labour’s Liam Byrne and the splendidly independent Tory lawyer Sir Bob Neill, but he didn’t seem to talk over the male committee members in the same way?
The fourth woman the PM tangled with was Labour’s Cat Smith, who quizzed him constructively over the Gaza crisis. But the next woman to be put down was not actually at the committee at all: his predecessor as prime minister, Liz Truss.
For reasons that are hard to fathom, except perhaps some gallows humour at the end of a long and disastrous period in Tory history, William Wragg, the Conservative chair of the public administration committee, asked: “What do you think about Liz Truss’s claim that she was undermined by the deep state?”
Sunak, eyes rolling, said: “It’s probably a question for her.”
Wragg kept pressing, and finally asked whether Sunak himself was a member of the deep state.
“But I probably wouldn’t tell you if I was, Will, would I? And we wouldn’t tell anyone else either, would we?” the PM mocked Truss to laughter, a joke that left nobody in doubt that he thinks his party’s previous leader and prime minister was as mad as a box of frogs.
Earlier in the day, Sky viewers were given an accidental glimpse of how chaotic it is inside Sunak HQ during a long interview with the education secretary, Gillian Keegan. She admitted she knew nothing at all about the Chinese spying crisis, but proudly assured us she used to know such stuff when she was “briefly” a minister in the foreign office.
How briefly? “Seven weeks.” This is how crazy things have got: Ministers no longer realise it is abnormal to be reshuffled every two months or so.
Before the day ended, yet another ministerial reshuffle was required after education minister Robert Halfon and armed forces minister James Heappey both resigned from the government, and will stand down as MPs at the general election. The government machine is in a dive, bits falling off its creaking wings.
Maybe the deep state should put it out of its misery.
