“Hmm hmm”
There was a moment, as I was listening to Rishi Sunak burbling on early Friday evening outside Downing Street, that I thought of something else. It’s only natural, given that as a speaker he displays an almost transcendent, Zen-like level of blankness, and a lack of empathy, or any discernible trace of human warmth. He’s a Prime Minister made by the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation¹. It took me a few seconds to connect the dots in my head to work out what it was that was tinkling little connective bells, but once it did it made perfect sense. Note: If you are one of those people who thinks JK Rowling is the Great Satan, you may want to look away, or just stop reading for a bit.
In Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, (fairly) early in proceedings, back at Hogwarts at the start of the new school year, Dumbledore’s usual address is interrupted by Dolores Umbridge standing up to deliver an unexpected and unwanted introductory address filled with what most appears to be a slew of the blandest of platitudes. Ron and Harry are stupefied by the inanity of it all, but in amongst it Hermione is paying more attention, and explains the subtext: “It means The Ministry is interfering at Hogwarts.”
The main thing most commentators could seem to agree about was the not subtly coded reference, given the Rochdale by-election result overnight, to what a rancid, self-serving, propagandising², bullshitting opportunist the egregious George Galloway is. He’s an MP again. He’s got 10 months tops, because he doesn’t have much of a record for getting elected for more than one term in most places. Let’s hope we can soon bid him another cheery, “fuckity bye”. Aside from that, most of the press coverage focused on the inanity of the MiniBot PM’s address, but didn’t really stop to note his use of the vague, and very non-specific mention of a “framework” to ostensibly deal with a problem that you could very reasonably claim is one that his own backbenches have had a significant hand in over the previous months.
At least in the short term you might think that such a “framework” would involve the increased use of arrests to disrupt protests, except that it’s quite hard for overstretched police to do that while discharging their other responsibilities given a lack of resource. You might also think that there may be an attempt to game the court process to enable quick prosecutions using any amount of legislative chicanery to allow ministers to sidestep Parliamentary scrutiny. None of this is too far beyond possibility given the language that has already been deployed in legislation designed to restrict rights of protest already passed in this Parliament.
He was at pains to talk about peaceful protests getting “hijacked by extremists”, which might seem seductively simple, and almost sensible at first glance, but it does give the government a very clear opportunity to at best publicly disregard, or at worst, prevent any form of protest to which they don’t wish to listen, simply by claiming it has been adulterated by extremist elements. I also cannot say I am entirely convinced that decisions about what will be counted as “extreme” or “peaceful” will be made in good faith by a party whom we have seen are not averse to placing narrow political interest over the wider public good. There are real and proper concerns about peaceful protest and what that means for public order in what is a pretty tense time for many reasons, but Sunak is quite evidently not the man to pour oil on the water to calm it. He can’t convincingly appeal for unity when he “leads” a (nominally) governing party in its final throes, clearly at war with itself, with too many of its members using the public sphere to promulgate increasingly intemperate and extreme views. He himself has not been slow to stoke the “culture war” fire for his own ends, and deploy the language of division he seems to be appealing against here. All of that is happening partly to win ideological support for the holy wars inside the Conservative Party itself, but also to shore up an increasingly weakening electoral base to stop it crumbling away entirely. Desperate tactics to limit the scale of what many Tories think is an inevitable defeat are driving ever more desperate measures.
So out Sunak trotted to deliver the great unifying address no one had asked for, or even wanted from him. Sadly, if he wanted to look statesmanlike, he failed. It felt like it should have been an easy win for him when he started rambling on about “freedom”, “British Values”, and “extremism” except it didn’t sound that way to me in the cack-handed fashion he delivered it. As much of a lying, amoral bastard as Johnson is, you can be fairly sure that if he’d been standing at the lectern at that point there would have been far more tub-thumping going on, whether you like that or not. Johnson is prolix and vague on detail, but the one thing he can transmit clearly is a sense of rhetorical pitch, and what emotional register he’s seeking to engage in an audience³. Sunak sounds like a monotonous AI reading the contents of an office stationery inventory to a bored six-year old who wanted a bedtime story⁴. It’s a constantly jarring reminder of his presence in a strange kind of Uncanny Valley as a public speaker. The resulting hallmark of most Sunak public speaking is therefore to make you feel constantly on edge and uncomfortable for unspecific, and difficult to articulate reasons. You can’t always expect finely calibrated detail in such circumstances, but this short speech achieved nothing, resolved nothing, and said nothing good. It only left a faint taste of a man saying something because he thought he had to, even though he had nothing new or constructive to offer, and beneath all of that was the veiled threat of unspecified reprecussions if we don’t behave. It’s a strange and unedifying kind of political theatre, and it’s not one I feel at all comfortable living in.
¹ “Share and Enjoy!”
² Paid as a correspondent for Russia Today, now proscribed in the UK. Hardly surprising.
³ That’s one of the very things that hugely expensive education was designed to instil. Hugely manipulative, and a bastard’s trick, but that’s the way they are schooled.
⁴ Now I think about it, that must have very much been what meetings between Chancellor Sunak and Prime Minister Johnson were like
