Christmas should be a lot of fun around the Sunacs. 7am: 5km run. 8.30am: breakfast of manuka honey granola. 9am: Check delivery to make sure all presents are under the tree. 10.30am: invite the family to open presents. All members must maintain a profit and loss sheet to ensure that the gifts they have received are more valuable than those they have given.
12 p.m.: a short Christmas lecture on the importance of victory. 12.30 p.m.: all family members should write a short board about the lessons learned in the lecture. 2:00 p.m.: Lunch of organic turkey crown with no side dishes. 3:00 p.m.: Unfinished homework to finish. 16-16.45: free time. No TV, console games or portable devices. Children can read books if they want. 16.46: children and adults to write letters of thanks. 18:30: stop Alexa from playing Ghost Town.
19:30: invite the family to fill out the survey. Tick the option that best describes the day. A) I was very pleased with my Christmas experience. B) I was very pleased with my Christmas experience. C) I was neither happy nor unhappy about my Christmas experience. D) I was quite unhappy with my Christmas experience. E) I was very unhappy with my Christmas experience. Now list one thing that would make your Christmas better. 8.30pm: University Challenge. 21:00: bed.
Rishi Sunak is a conundrum. Schrödinger’s prime minister. The more you see it, the less it seems. A person who doesn’t care much about anything. A man who is so rich that he can afford not to be seen even if he cares about his wealth. His beliefs were dictated by a Goldman Sachs training manual. The country for him is just an intellectual playground. Its people just problems to solve. Preferably with a PowerPoint presentation. He is a man without emotional impact. Either dead or empty inside. Or just completely off.
All this was perfect for Rish’s first appearance! before the Liaison Committee – the Supergroup Select Committee made up of the Committee Chairs that Bernard Jenkin, the Liaison Chair, allows to attend. And it has to be admitted that Jenkin had chosen a mostly D-list of committee chairs this time – all the really good ones were either promoted or out – so Sunak wasn’t unduly taxed. Yet he was utterly robotic in his nonsensical management nonsense answers. His superiors would be thrilled. He never once made eye contact with anyone in the room.
Alicia Kearns, the new chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee, went first. He is quick to make a splash. Was the government cooling down on Ukraine? Absolutely not, said Rish!. He just could never seem too excited about anything. Was he going soft on China? No, it was a coincidence that the Chinese diplomats were allowed to leave before being expelled.
“Are you okay?” Kearns pressed.
“I’m really, really healthy,” Sunak replied.
“But are you?”
“I am. I am,” he squeaked monotonously. He was the healthiest person in the room. Healthier than anyone else. When no one was looking, he made RPGs to give away to the Ukraine in his spare time.
Jenkin began rushing committee chairs. He didn’t want them to accidentally ask pertinent questions. And besides, Rish! had said he could spare only 90 minutes of his time. Most Prime Ministers spent two or three hours on the Liaison Committee. But Sunak had promised not to say anything mean, so why bother wasting everyone’s time?
Good, said Diana Johnson, the chairwoman of the Home Affairs Committee, one of the most flamboyant members of the view. How big will the influx of unprocessed refugees be next year? Uh… We would have cleared most of this year’s backlog, except for the ones we wouldn’t have counted. And then there will be an accumulation of all the refugees that will arrive in the next year. So we would be back where we started. But Rwanda would help a lot. Refugees will simply see what an ideal destination this is and try to get there directly. So we’ll save a fortune on plane tickets. Or something.
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Then we moved on to the cost of living. Was there anything you regretted about your time as chancellor? Rish! think for a minute. Not quite, he said. He had done everything almost perfectly. As was clearly seen. Although if there was a fault, it was that the UK wasn’t quite ready for his brilliance. Or his modesty.
Inflation was a problem, Sunak admitted. Although he made it sound like an abstract irritant rather than a matter of heating or eating. Certainly not something to keep him from sleeping. Nor did he care about food banks. In general, he would prefer that people not use them, but he had no intention of stopping anyone. It was as if he had misheard the question. Except he clearly hadn’t. Food banks are too alien a concept to tap into its veiled reality.
Neither does Rish! many are interested in the first ever NHS strikes. Nurses and ambulance staff should be happy with people clapping for them. And he was saddened that they wanted more money, because he hoped they wouldn’t be so greedy as to ask for more than a real pay cut. Too bad there wasn’t someone from the NHS in the room to fix it.
Sunak was equally lenient when it came to Scotland. He would deliver to Scotland. He could not say what he would deliver or when he would deliver it, but he expected the Scots to be grateful when he delivered something. On his delivery board.
Various committee members walked out before the end. Well, maybe. We had learned nothing. Except Rish’s smugness! Listening to him talk, you’d think the country had never been in better shape. When the reality is we’re all Christmas snobs.
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