It’s time for some home truths, Rishi

I wonder how many people in the country are bitterly disappointed that Liz Truss pulled out of her exciting one-to-one interview with Nick Robinson? I can think of only two. First, of course, Nick Robinson. Nick was very much looking forward to it. His ideal assignment would be to interview himself for an entire afternoon, but failing that, Liz Truss would do just fine. The other, of course, is Rishi Sunak, who must have been hoping that Liz would dig herself another hole and carry on digging until she emerged somewhere near Maruia Springs, say, in New Zealand’s Southern Alps.

I suppose it is just about possible that some of Nick’s producers were also disappointed that Liz pulled out, given that they may have a horrifically stunted view of what people consider ‘interesting’. Back in the late 1990s, when I was editor of the Today programme, we interviewed candidates for the post of producer with the first question to them being: ‘If you could choose anyone from history to interview on Today, living or dead, real or fictional, who would you choose?’ One candidate replied, with great verve: ‘Alan Milburn!’ We did not appoint that candidate, but I assume they got a job on World at One.

Other than that, surely nobody. The entire country has become stupefied with boredom at the whole interminable saga and would rather, I suspect, never hear anything from either jabbering dwarf ever again. The Conservatives have got this whole process the wrong way around. There was insufficient time for the country to find out about the likes of Kemi Badenoch and Tom Tugendhat before they were unceremoniously evicted, and far too long given over to the performative gibberish spewed out on a daily basis subsequently by Sunak and Truss.

The only hope for the party is that Sunak, in a desperate, flailing attempt to capture the hearts of the Conservative activists, starts delivering a few home truths which in other times he would be too frit to address. There is some evidence that he has already embarked upon this policy, given that he has retrospectively decided that the Sage scientists were all deranged sociopaths and that lockdowns should never have been imposed. That is a very popular view among the party members (and more besides, and more every day) – and it actually addresses an important question as to whether we should take any notice of Neil Ferguson when, trousers around his ankles, he hoves into view waving his bloody useless charts at us all.

Rishi’s position on the topic, though, is somewhat undermined by the fact that he was the chancellor during the whole of the pandemic and issued not so much as a bat-squeak of complaint at every absurd measure introduced to keep us all in our homes for weeks on end hoarding lavatory paper. Yes, I understand the notion of ‘collective responsibility’ – but if Sunak was as aghast as he now suggests, then why did he not do the principled thing and resign? Even so, his observations are welcome, and if he could broaden his attack on to the efficacy of masks and the advisability of having commies advising the government in times of crisis, so much the better.

Given that Rishi has nothing to lose, and a world to win, there are a whole host of subjects upon which he might speak the truth instead of following a line which is politically correct but also counter-productive. I would like Sunak to announce that he intends to scrap the National Health Service and replace it with something that works, for example. Nobody dare say that the NHS is hopeless, despite the fact it is incontestably hopeless. You either raise the top rate of tax to 65 per cent or above and pour money down its ravenous maw – the economic equivalent of standing on your doorstep banging saucepans together for it – or you perform radical surgery on the beast immediately.

This would of course bring forth howls of outrage from the lefties who would immediately allege that ‘the Tories are going to flog off the NHS to their rich friends’. When they parrot that line, I would hope Sunak would reply: ‘Yes, that is exactly what I’m going to do. I’m going to flog the NHS off to my rich friends, because they will make a better job of running it.’ Nobody has so far had the balls to address this rotting albatross hanging around our necks, because it is more trouble than it’s worth to do so. But if you have nothing to lose, and your position is right, why not?

Another crisis we face is a shortage of housing. The traditional – performative – means of addressing this is to say we’re going to build lots and lots of new houses and there’s an end to it. The trouble is that apart from not building new houses, what the government has done so far to address the issue is actually counter-productive and has already made the housing crisis worse. Once again, that’s because it has been acting in a performative manner.

If you have a housing crisis, I would suggest that the last thing you should do is wage a spiteful, woke war against the people who provide nearly 20 per cent of the UK’s accommodation – private landlords. They are currently fleeing the sector in their droves because of new stipulations concerning their rights to raise rents, evict tenants and prevent skanks moving in with five American pitbulls called Tyson, Genghis, Hitler, Smackhead and Spice.

A sensible administration would make it easier for landlords to rent out their properties, rather than usher them towards the Airbnb market or into selling them for profit. The likelihood is that there will be fewer places to rent, especially at the lower end of the market, because the Conservative party is more concerned about how it looks to people than with actual outcomes.