UK Election Unchained: Sunak’s Special Ops
Highlights of Week One of election season. Sunak’s loadout for Downing Street, Starmer’s deep gullet
It already seems a long time ago, but just last week a sad-looking Rishi Sunak walked out into the rain to call a general election. There are differing views on what he was thinking by letting himself get drenched, some think it was poor planning, some think it a heartwrenching attempt to evoke pity (unfortunately people are not able to pity politicians, for they are not human). Personally, I fall into the camp of thinking that he was trying to appear tough and resilient to the rain. He wanted it to bounce off him as he stood unperturbed like a football manager on the sidelines or a Hollywood movie star being dumped. In my opinion, to achieve the desired effect, it would have been better to ditch the suit, which adopted a very soggy look as it got dripped on, and go down to just a shirt, and potentially if he could fit in a few sit-ups beforehand, a muscly physique bursting through the wet linen would have helped. 99% of elections are won on sex appeal.
In any case, the election was called. The pyres were lit. Almost immediately, opposition leader Keir Starmer spoke in front of cameras nicely sheltered indoors, like a coward. But he had Union flags behind him, like a patriotic hero. Thus we launched full-throttle into election season, and Starmer wasted no time in attempting to pass himself off as a proper bloke, launching Labour’s campaign at a football ground and according to official PINTWATCH sources, has been seeing drinking at least one beer already. This brings the PINTWATCH score for the first week to:
Starmer: At least 1
Sunak: 0
This could be the metric that really decides the election and, without wanting to spoil the result for anyone, I believe Rishi Sunak is teetotal.
While Starmer has been at the pub (like a legend), Sunak was soberly parading through a series of blunders. After getting himself wet in a thoroughly unsexy way, he then committed the mortal sin of being only okay at football. He then went to the shipyard in Northern Ireland where the Titanic was built, opening up the question of whether he was “captaining a sinking ship”, when Sunak would have much preferred an invitation to be drawn naked with a gem across his chest, to boost his tarnished sex appeal. He then retreated into a day off, presumably cancelling a tour of Lockerbie, to get his head down and rethink strategy with a nice cup of tea. This in stark contrast to Keir ‘Grindset’ Starmer, who is reassuring business people that he is just like them by taking no days off during the campaign, also waking up at 5am and having seven meals of kale each day. Sunak re-emerged from this reprieve with a landmark policy, harkening back to the 1950s, of introducing national service for 18 year olds. As someone firmly above the age of 18, I have to say that those kids swapping in their iPhones for buzzcuts and incessant marching could be about the only thing that can save this country. If the sight of mopey teenagers that don’t want to be there doesn’t have Putin running scared, then what hope does Starmer have? As Jeremy Hunt said “If Keir Starmer can’t deal with Diane Abbott, how on Earth is he going to deal with Vladimir Putin?” Which would be a good point if Diane Abbott was a foreign leader that commanded the fifth largest military in the world, rather than a 70-year-old woman whose seat Starmer could probably take or leave at this point.
On the point of former Labour heavyweights, they don’t get much heavier or more weighty than Jeremy Corbyn, who officially announced that he would be running as independent against the party he was leader of until 2020. I’m sure Keir Starmer is relishing the news circus constantly asking him questions about these individuals, if the stories about these seats slow down too much he might have to field harder questions, like trying to define what the difference is between his Labour and the Tories. They both champion zionist and xenophobic MPs, neither want to tax big business or upset them with workers’ rights, but one of them seems desperate to get into power and the other seems desperate to leave power.
Now that I’ve got all the nonsense out of the way, it’s time to get into the nitty gritty of policy proposals. A brief look tells me that VAT is a big issue right now because… all of the major parties are agreed that they don’t want to raise it. And elsewhere, the Tories have announced something called ‘Triple Lock Plus’ Pension Allowance, which I don’t really understand and sounds boring. Pass.
Onto next week and more drama and hopefully fewer clips of Ed Davey doing outdoor activities to try and go viral!
Thanks for reading! UK Election Unchained will be back next week.
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