Finally, the wine stains had been removed from the walls of number 10. The containers sprinkled with vomit had been thrown into the container. The carpets had been steam cleaned. The last of the latecomers had been knocked out of the back door, away from intrusive CCTV cameras.
Boris Johnson had fought a hangover to stumble down the stairs to thank the little people for all the work they had done. Although it was really an opportunity for the cleaners to apologize to Boris. The special. The Holy Man. They couldn’t believe how badly his staff had beaten him and wanted to apologize for being so slow to clear up the mess. Or so Boris felt.
Finally, 10 Bullingdon Street was ready to move on. Although the rest of the country was not. Now it was only a matter of counting the total costs of the number 10 parties, which Rishi Sunak was about to do to the Commons while presenting his latest budget. Most governments are happy to get one a year, but this chancellor is already in the third and we have not yet reached the summer. Give it a try and there will be several more before the fall.
The convict entered the room a few seconds before Sunak got up. He looked terrible, even by his current standards. As if she had just stumbled out of bed. She could barely keep her swollen eyes open, the child’s haircut everywhere, the stained dress, the stained face.
If he ever saw himself in a mirror, he would look for the hills. He could barely stand the 20 minutes it took the chancellor to spend the money he didn’t know he didn’t have. As soon as Rishi finished, he ran to the exit. Presumably to find a container to vomit. We and the Conservatives are very lucky to have it.
Sunak didn’t look any better. Not that he looked as sick as he looked empty. In recent months, he has passed the bill, as he has gone from a candidate for leadership to also running. Only the temporary headline at 11 Downing Street. Never an old man, now he seems to occupy a negative space. It blinks and you miss it. Not so much a presence as an absence.
Again, you would probably want to disappear if you knew that the next hour would be a ritual humiliation. For weeks, the chancellor has insisted that there was no money to help with the cost of living and that an extraordinary tax was unthinkable. He was not conservative. People who had difficulty paying their bills should stop crying and accept that there were limits to what they could expect from the government. In fact, the poorest had a duty to die. Natural selection and all that.
Now, however, Sunak had to explain that the Sunak who had said all this was a Sunak very different from that of the Commons. He had had a long experience outside the body and had been possessed by an alien. Because the person who said he didn’t care shit hadn’t really been him.
Rishi tried to soften his expression. By the end of the day, he had realized that he cared. He really felt that people who could not afford the £ 10,000 should rent a helicopter to take them to a conservative fundraiser. Although mostly I only heard for The Convict. Because no one had any doubt that he was really doing all this to save Johnson. Had the government not lied through Partygate, there would have been no need to distract the rescue package.
So here was the deal. Sunak was very worried about inflation. But unlike the governor of the Bank of England, he believed he could do something about it. And what he was going to do was get the governor to do something about what he said he could not control. Make sense of it if you can. There again, he said he was lowering taxes while raising taxes. None of this seemed to fill any of his front-line colleagues with much optimism because he knew what he was doing.
With inflation under control, Sunak apparently felt confident in presenting his package which in no way intended to cover up the remnants of the party. I was going to introduce the extraordinary income tax first which was not an extraordinary income tax. And they had definitely not stolen it from Labor who had been defending this tax for the past five months. The Tories had the idea at the same time. They just didn’t know what to call it. So welcome to the world of “The Temporary Targeted Energy Levy”.
Then came the idea of converting the pre-arranged loan into a grant. Tick. Another work plan was aspired to. It was as if the opposition had a chance to draft the budget. No less important when Sunak became even more generous than Labor had claimed with an additional £ 10bn in deliveries, many of them surprisingly destined for those who needed them most. The chancellor had no idea how he was going to pay for any of this, of course, but then he never had it for any of his previous budgets. Maybe something would show up. Otherwise, we were heading for a bigger inflationary migraine.
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Rachel Reeves, of the worker, stood up to receive applause. To say that there would be no charge for cutting Labor’s copyright, but now it might be a good idea to give up the functioning of the whole economy. And she wasn’t going to humiliate Sunak by saying how many U-turns she’d made. Well, maybe just this three times. The chancellor could not look her in the eye. Instead, he kept his eyes on the shoes all the time. It shrank faster than the economy. It would have been nice if one of his classmates had picked it up and put it in his pocket.
Of the Conservative backbenchers, only John Redwood and Richard Drax had any concerns. The rest just sucked it, keeping their record of deep intellectual dishonesty, pretending it was what they had always wanted and that they cared about shit too. If it had been a Labor government, it would have been howling cries of socialism.
However, they will no doubt have another chance to rediscover their conservative roots. The current £ 15bn package will barely touch the surface of the cost of living crisis. Glued plaster. Long before the end of the year, people will be cold and hungry. Then we’ll see how generous The Convict and Sunak feel. Chances are there is a bit of a nuisance that they want to cover up. Therefore, it will only be a matter of guilt that causes them to do the right thing.