This article originally appeared in our Elevenses newsletter.
Good morning. When Rishi Sunak took the keys to Number 10 he did so with one final swipe at his predecessor-but-one, Boris Johnson. Elected on slogans but toppled by scandals, Britain’s blonde bombshell PM saw his inglorious reign come to an end after Partygate, Porngate, the Owen Paterson affair, the Chris Pincher affair and the illegal prorogation of Parliament chipped away at the tidal wave of support that propelled him to office in 2019. Under Sunak – the Tory membership’s second swing at picking a competent leader – things would be different, with the Richmond MP pledging to lead a government with “integrity, professionalism and accountability at every level”. Seven months into his premiership, and he has already failed on every one of those measures.
For a start, the government’s tendency to pepper parliament with half-truths has remained alive and well under Sunak’s premiership. Keen to make Hansard the new home of fake news he claimed to have reintroduced the nurses’ bursary as chancellor, which of course was not true. Sunak offered a new educational grant of £5,000 a year (increasing to £8,000 in some cases), but that fell significantly short of the bursary system, which had earlier been scrapped by the Conservative government. He then claimed there had been a “record number of new homes built in the last year”, which was rubbished by Full Fact, and used incorrect figures in a fiery debate over the Home Office’s plans to tackle the backlog of asylum claims. He told the House of Commons that the backlog is “half the size that it was when Labour was in office” on December 13th. The reality? There has been a net increase of 147,307.
Sunak’s claim to want accountability at every level of government was also dealt a further blow this week as he found himself at the heart of a ‘Covid cover-up’ after Johnson’s WhatsApp texts and notebooks seemingly vanished. The Cabinet Office claimed it no longer held the material. Before that, it was claiming parts of it were irrelevant anyway, which is surely something for an inquiry to decide, no? Ministers have been given until 4pm today to hand over the messages and aid Sunak in his quest to restore faith in the system, but the delay has already caused irreparable damage.
Yet even if he hadn’t lied to parliament, or hadn’t had run-ins with the police, or hadn’t impeded the Covid inquiry, Sunak will still have found his pledge to deliver truth and integrity almost impossible to deliver because, as one Guardian reader gloriously put it, he is “hitched to the wagon of Brexit lies”. This month one of the most ardent backers admitted that the split with Europe had failed, with large swathes of the electorate also coming to the same conclusion. But the Tory government, with no other notable achievements to its name, can never admit this, so they bluff and bluster about trade deals, economic performance and a whole host of other Brexit-related issues to bury that fact.
In the end, when “you routinely lie about one topic, it becomes second nature to lie about others. So honesty can never return to our government until we have a party in power that openly admits to all the disastrous effects of Brexit.”
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