Rishi Sunak claimed yesterday:

This King’s Speech delivers change. Change in our economy. Change in our society. Change in our communities.

It doesn’t, though, does it?

The only thing ‘delivered’ was a speech, once in a ceremonial pouch and once verbally from a throne.

There was precisely no difference in our economy, society or communities after the speech compared to before it. We can argue all day about whether the speech discussed meaningful change in those areas, but nobody—nobody—can credibly claim that it delivered any change whatsoever.

Rishi Sunak appears to use ‘deliver’ as a synonym for ‘talk about.’

Once this is understood, a whole load of puzzling pronouncements suddenly make sense. Take this from the Government’s briefing on the King’s speech:

Integrity, professionalism, accountability. That’s what I promised when I stood on the steps of Downing Street just over a year ago – and that’s what we have delivered.

Read ‘talked about’ for ‘delivered’, and this is a far less disorienting description. It’s a similar story for this section of his recent conference speech:

I have seen up close the quality of our Armed Forces and intelligence services. Truly, the finest in the world. The debt of gratitude we owe them is why we are making this the best place to be a veteran.  I know we will deliver because we have a minister for veterans affairs sitting in Cabinet.

We ought to parse this as ‘I know we will talk about this because I’ve appointed someone to talk about it.’

It’s maybe churlish to point out that the Government’s own guidance says that the word ‘deliver’ ought to be avoided as insufficiently clear:

Use ‘make’, ‘create’, ‘provide’ or a more specific term (pizzas, post and services are delivered – not abstract concepts like improvements)

But at least the Prime Minister has helped us understand his idiosyncratic use of the word.

The image at the top of this post was generated by DALL·E 3.

It’s the State Opening of Parliament today.

Wendy and I have been speculating for weeks on who might lead the BBC’s television coverage in the absence of Huw Edwards—there’s never a dull moment in our house. We’d guessed Kirsty Young, but the job has gone to Wheel of Fortune and radio phone-in host Nicky Campbell.

It may turn out to be today’s boldest decision. Rishi Sunak appears to be pursuing a slightly weird strategy of promising boldness while delivering abject timidity. His bold new plan for HS2 was not to build half of it. His conference ‘rabbit’ was to ask Parliament to have a little think about banning smoking, but not to ask his MPs to actually vote for it. His solution to overcrowded prisons is not to reform criminal justice nor build more cells, but to rent some rooms overseas. His approach to meeting targets on net zero is to water them down. He’s exercised about tinkering with the guidance for local Councils on speed limits. The King’s Speech will announce a bill to ban some leaseholds, but not the tricky ones such as flats.

I’m no fan of the majority of policies pursued by this Government, not of its approach to governing, so I ought to be thrilled that Sunak has set his sights so low. Yet the overriding impression is of bathetic smallness and inadequacy.

Surely the country can do better than this?

According to YouGov, 77% of adults in Great Britain think Sunak’s government has achieved ‘not very much’ or ‘not much at all.’ It doesn’t feel like this approach is a great way to tackle that perception.

The picture at the top is my own from a few years ago. I like the unusual opportunity to see Parliament with all the ugly security barriers removed during the State Opening. I also used it in 2014 for a post reflecting on the legislative harm associated with the State Opening.

A local politician popped up on our regional news bulletin yesterday evening. This was the sum total of his contribution:

What we’ve seen today is a series of meaningless soundbites that will provide very little reassurance to families that are struggling right now. To turn our economy round, we need tough but necessary decisions.

These two sentences could have been ejaculated by any representative of virtually any UK political party discussing virtually any issue. There is poetry in their vacuity. It is content-free speech lamenting content-free speech. There’s no hint of an idea, a political message, or even a substantive criticism.

Rather than the politician spending time on constructing such empty verbiage, the reporter and crew attending to film it, and the viewers having to listen to it, perhaps in future we could just replace it with one of those classic slient film caption cards: “ … “

A year ago today, Rishi Sunak stood outside the front door of 10 Downing Street and gave a speech. The opening lines were:

Good morning,

I have just been to Buckingham Palace and accepted His Majesty The King’s invitation to form a government in his name.

It is only right to explain why I am standing here as your new Prime Minister.

He never did get around to covering the topic he set himself and explaining why he is the new Prime Minister. It’s a peculiar omission which struck Wendy and me at the time. It comes across almost as though he’s not quite sure how he ended up there.

That’s not an impression that has faded with time.

There’s this odd section, where I can only assume he unintentionally skipped a line or a page from his script:

After the billions of pounds it cost us to combat Covid, after all the dislocation that caused in the midst of a terrible war that must be seen successfully to its conclusions I fully appreciate how hard things are.

There’s no pause nor flicker of recognition of stringing together 39 words into a single sentence that is devoid of meaning. It sounds though he’s slightly robotic, as though he’s converting text to speech in a manner that bypasses higher executive function.

That, too, turned out not to be a passing vibe.

I’m rubbish at political predictions, but—despite what the commentators might say about an election that’s as late as possible—I just can’t see this charade lasting another year.

The image at the top of this post was generated by DALL·E 3.

Twenty years ago, Tony Blair—then Prime Minster—was ‘rushed’ to hospital with a ‘heart scare’ resulting in a cardioversion.

A couple of days later, when it was clear that all was well, a single-word letter appeared in The Guardian. It was written by Percival Turnbull, and it was so perfectly pitched that I still often think about it:

I wonder whether this gently cutting humour still has a place in politics twenty years on. It often feels like public discourse has been overtaken by such violent polarisation that this kind of pointed lightheartedness has lost its place.

I hope there is still room for it. I think that interventions which gently and humorously needle in a way that makes people consider an underlying message can be remarkably effective.

After an epidemic of epidemics, you may have been wondering whether another rhetorician’s unsettling (and slightly weird) reference to a hurricane was part of a trend.

Hansard lists eighteen references in Parliament to a ‘hurricane’ in the last twelve months. Here’s a breakdown of what each mention was about:

• Windy weather (18)

I’m not blown away.

The image at the top of this post was generated by Midjourney.

Here in Newcastle, there’s been a long-running saga about a massive new housing estate—Great Park. In fact, ‘massive housing estate’ considerably undersells it: with more than 4,000 homes planned, it is essentially a whole new suburb of the city.

Construction started in 2001 and has continued apace. A town centre was constructed some years ago, but until recently it was the subject of great controversy because there were virtually no shops or services open in the units built along it. Residents were very upset that they had no local services. Earlier this year, Morrisons opened in the town centre to great fanfare.

It’s against this backdrop that I read over the weekend that Rishi Sunak disapproves of services being close to where people live. To quote BBC News:

The Government said its plan would stop councils implementing “15-minute cities”, where essential amenities are always within a 15-minute walk.

Apparently, Sunak considers building essential amenities close to people’s homes to be part of a

war on motorists

A war we can only assume is being waged by the Government. Imagine how angry he will be when he realises who’s in charge of that.

Now, Newcastle hasn’t had so much as a Conservative councillor for almost three decades, so perhaps I’m out of touch. Indeed, in the latest round of local elections, their percentage share of the vote didn’t make it into double figures, their 27 candidates averaging fewer than 300 votes apiece. I walk past my local Conservative club most days, and their brass plaque is frequently defaced with amusing, topically critical slogans written on masking tape, which always strikes me as a politely British form of protest.

Yet: I can’t imagine that a desire to put essential amenities further away from people’s houses is likely to be a vote-winner. I don’t know anyone who has ever said “I can’t rent this place, the GP is less than 15 minutes’ walk away!”

This is Sunak pandering to ridiculous conspiracy theorists, seemingly without any insight into the fact that the Government is assumed to be part of the conspiracy. It is literally laughable: I was sitting on a park bench when I read that BBC line, and I laughed out loud.

Today, we get to see whether he has enough similarly insane policy ideas to turn his first—and, I’d happily wager, last—conference party leader speech into a stand-up comedy act.

Here’s hoping.

Over recent years, we’ve all become quite used to the language of epidemiology. There are few people who would be flummoxed by the word ‘pandemic’ these days, and unlike 2018, no-one accidentally refers to ‘breakouts’ instead of ‘outbreaks’ these days.

Hansard lists fifty-seven things described in Parliament as an ‘epidemic’ in the last twelve months. When arranged in order of frequency of mentions, there is quite a long tail.

I wonder how many of them you could name off the top of your head.

Could you guess the top ten?

• Violence against women and girls (described an epidemic 17 times)
• COVID-19 (16)
• Vaping (10)
• Fraud (9)
• HIV/AIDS (9)
• Avian influenza (8)
• Obesity (7)
• Eating disorders (5)
• Loneliness (5)
• Bowel disease in the North East (5)
• Pornography (4)
• Allergy (3)
• Homelessness (3)
• Self-harm and suicide (3)
• Tuberculosis (3)
• Child sexual abuse (2)
• Cholera (2)
• Illicit use of Monkey Dust in Stoke-on-Trent (2)
• Mental illness (2)
• Pandemic influenza (2)
• Rape (2)
• Sewage spills (2)
• Sexual harassment (2)
• Youth violence (2)
• Arson (1)
• Antisemitism (1)
• Brain injury (1)
• Brain tumours (1)
• Bullying in the armed forces (1)
• Crime committed by young people (1)
• Crime in Blackpool (1)
• Dental ill-health (1)
• Discrimination against women at work (1)
• Dumping food and drink packaging in parks (1)
• Ebola (1)
• Exhaustion among NHS staff (1)
• Executions in Iran (1)
• Food and mouth disease (1)
• GPs moving to ‘ring-road’ locations (1)
• Heat stress (1)
• High street bank closures (1)
• Illicit use of nitrous oxide (1)
• Illness related to the Bhopal disaster (1)
• Knife crime (1)
• Lung disease in among children living near Heathrow Airport (1)
• Malaria (1)
• Misogyny (1)
• Moral injury among military personnel (1)
• Mpox (1)
• Name changes among sex offenders (1)
• Polio (1)
• Potential future injuries related to exposure to asbestos in unaudited rubbish dumps created by the Ministry of Defence (1)
• Seasonal influenza (1)
• Short-sightedness (1)
• Teenage nicotine addiction (1)
• Type 2 diabetes (1)
• Workplace harassment (1)

The image at the top of this post was generated by Midjourney.

The UK Government doesn’t see the climate catastrophe as one of its ‘priorities’—‘stopping the boats’ is more important than protecting the future of life of Earth. Perhaps, then, I shouldn’t be surprised by the newspaper reports this morning that Sunak is descending further into populism by ‘watering down’ his climate commitments.

Liam Byrne’s ‘there’s no money left’ note has been a millstone around the neck of the Labour Party for the last 13 years.

We’re often told that the Conservative Party is an election winning machine. It is incredible that their strategists can’t see that this policy is their own equivalent if they are hoping to return to Government in 2029 or 2034—after five or ten more years of growing floods, fires, and climate-related chaos.

Writing for the Financial Times yesterday, George Parker and Lucy Fisher said:

Next year, Sunak will ask the public at a general election to trust the Tories with another five years in power. Even many in his own party believe he is doomed to fail, that he will be dragged under by the legacy of 13 years of Conservative rule: public sector austerity, Brexit, the chaos and lies of Boris Johnson, the Covid-19 lockdown parties and the economic meltdown of Truss’s brief tenure.

Nonetheless, Sunak remains bullish about his chances of defying the sceptics, with the economy faring better and inflation coming under control. A revamped Number 10 operation is determined to deliver a fifth consecutive Tory election victory. “He really believes he can do it,” says one Downing Street insider.

I think—and hope—Sunak is wrong. I don’t think the Government he leads represents the best group of people to run the country. But Sunak’s confidence gives me optimism.

I worry that Sunak’s best chance of retaining power is a snap, single-issue election in the next handful of months, the issue being the European Convention on Human Rights. A pretext can be manufactured easily, and may even be handed on a plate by a Supreme Court decision that deporting asylum seekers to Rwanda contravenes the Convention. The fact that withdrawal would be controversial provides a strong pretext for “putting it to the people” at a general election. It’s not hard to imagine the right-wing press campaigning fervently in support: “you might not like everything about the Tories, but this is our one opportunity to get this done.” It’s also not hard to imagine that message cutting through.

The logic of enacting this plan this autumn is also straightforward: Sunak can argue that he is “making progress” on his “priorities” and it bounces Labour onto the turf on which they are currently least comfortable, before they’ve worked out their election position. With the press behind them, the Conservatives can define the terms of the debate and largely keep the election as a single-issue vote.

The most dangerous thing for a party heading to an election is ennui introduced by low expectations. The clear narrative based on polling is that Labour is on course to win the next election. The best way to suspend those expectations is by doing something unexpected: calling an early election and redefining the terms of that election to something where the majority view is less clear-cut. Suddenly, the narrative becomes that “it’s all to play for”—inflating the perception of the popularity of the Conservative vote.

This would be a horrible thing to happen. It would spark a distressingly toxic debate and—by definition—give voice to some of our most inhumane tendencies. For what it’s worth, I also don’t think it would work: I don’t think moderate Conservatives would fall into line, I don’t think this sort of campaign would energise large sections of their base, and I think Labour would find ways to cut through with strong ‘change’ messages. This ‘nuclear option’ might be Sunak’s best shot, but I still think it’s a long shot.

If Sunak “really believes” he can win conventionally, then this bet—not to mention the damage it could do to Sunak’s reputation and future earning potential—is not worth the risk. And if Sunak’s confidence avoids us taking a disastrous path, then it’s hard not to like it.