CUDDIS investigates.
Tory Prime Minister number five feels the pain of childhood deprivation apparently. There’s an emotional void in his upbringing where Sky TV should have been. Must we fall for this latest attempt to con the public into believing that, like the man in the chip shop queue, multi-millionaire, Rishi Sunak, is just another of Jock Tampson’s bairns?
Rishi Sunak belongs to the large subset of Brexit enriched Tories who’s members are so embarrassingly minted that they have to invent humble beginnings to falsely imply kinship with the electorate. And so garner votes under false pretences.
However, the bold facts clash violently with his faux recollections of hard times. The Sunday Times Rich List estimates Mr and Mrs Sunak’s fortune at £730m, a figure that ensures that they’ll never have to stay in on a Saturday night because they can’t afford their bingo books down the Gala.
The idea that your average punter could ever accumulate Sunak sized sums by clocking in and out of the modern equivalent of a dark satanic mill, beggars belief. Joe Soap is more likely to lead a working life in which he shambles home, shattered, after a 12 hour shift looking like a post-apocalyptic zombie in a boiler suit. With nothing to look forward to but the certainty that he’ll still need to apply for Universal Credit to make ends meet.
Rishi and his current cabal of reality-denying cabinet members have been projecting fake personas for years. But, to be fair to Mr. Sunak, he’s not the only Tory trying to harvest voter sympathy by telling porkies. Pretending to have spent Saturday evenings at jellied eel and pickled egg parties, clustered around mater’s upright piano singing ‘Boiled beef and carrots’ is a standard narrative in the upper echelons of the Conservative Party. It disingenuously punts to the electorate, the hogwash of humble beginnings (‘We kept ourselves warm in the winter by wiping our arses with nettles, though through hard work and self-sacrifice I was eventually parachuted into a safe seat.’)
As an example of projecting a fake past to dazzle voters, in March of this year, you’ll recall that Rishi borrowed a Kia Rio from a Sainsbury’s worker for a petrol station photoshoot aimed at conning people into thinking he’s everyman. But it was all military grade bollocks. Remember, this is the same bloke that promised to take cash away from deprived urban areas and give it to the leafy suburbs. Sadly, in such God-forsaken places, leaky duck house roofs a-plenty are in desperate need of a re-thatch (There’s no sadder sight around the shires than a drenched mallard.)
Remember also, when Rishi was spotted clomping about a building site in £500 Prada shoes — that’s a shave under two months of Universal Credit payments for a single person under 25. I imagine he didn’t wear his Memphis Lace-Up £475 Jimmy Choo trainers for the building site romp that day either. He keeps those for splashing through sharn flooded byres chasing the farmers’ votes that he and his pals squandered during Brexit.
Fortunately for voters already suffering from election fatigue, with mere weeks before a General Election, there’s no time left for the Tories to switch leaders. It’s Rishi or bust (Bust would be my guess, and Ladbroke’s agree.) The nation will choose on 4 July which party’s lies deserve their support. And of course, for independence-seeking Scots it will be, for the umpteenth time, Hobson’s Choice.
For now we’re stuck watching Rishi punch the air every time the lionesses are awarded a throw in. That ought to net a few dozen floating voter football fans. I’d wager a month’s pension that he’d agree to appear on the BBC cosplaying an expert on the offside rule in lacrosse if he thought there were a half a dozen votes in it for him.
The late, great American actor and comedian, W.C.Fields — Bill to his friends — told a funny story that perfectly captures the idea of a man born with a canteen of silver spoons in his mouth claiming humble beginnings and extolling the virtues of hard work as a route to riches. Bill said, ‘When I came to this town, I had nothing but a sack on my back, and now I own eight hotels!’
“What was in the sack, Bill?’ Someone asked.
‘Twelve million dollars,’ Bill replied.
If there ever were a Jock Tamson, I suspect he’d have disowned Rishi a long time ago.
