Oh, the trainers. The trainers are a new low. It’s last Friday, and Rishi Sunak, the most Instagram-savvy PM we have ever had, posts a new video. What does he say? Nobody knows. Nobody cares. What matters are the shoes. For they are Adidas Sambas, and they are very cool. Or they were.
“Even Politicians Are Wearing Sambas Now,” wails a despairing headline in the American menswear bible GQ. Later, GQ’s British website follows up with a second column on the same subject, because that’s how important this is. “Can Rishi Sunak leave the Adidas Samba alone, please?” pleads the writer, but it’s far, far too late.
In The Telegraph, a columnist describes a friend texting to say his own are about to be burnt. You know things are bleak when you’re less cool than the friend of a Telegraph columnist. It’s no better in The Guardian, where trends in trainers are traditionally considered at least as important as, for example, wars. Poor Rishi. This is how bad it’s got. We’ve reached the stage where he can’t even wear shoes.
This is not, I swear, to be a column about shoes, but we’ve had three paragraphs on them already so, hey, in for a penny loafer. So, recall that in 2022, Sunak was slammed for wearing a pair of £335 Common Projects sneakers, and Nadine Dorries once had a go at him for some £450 Prada loafers. The Samba, by contrast, is a notably populist trainer, yours for a mere £90. Sorry, I drifted into mad fashion grammar there; let’s clarify, you do get two. But he’d thought about this. There was a Shoe Strategy. And it went horribly wrong.
Small picture, the shoes. Big picture, everything. Polls are sliding, even when you’d think they can go no lower. Flagship policies — the cut to national insurance — land to utter public indifference. Unforced errors abound. This weekend, the party withdrew a bizarre poster campaign which boasted “Britain Is the Second Most Powerful Country In The World” and showed Sunak next to a losing football team that is English rather than British anyway, a fighter jet we largely buy from America, and a Swiss/South Korean container ship. Why any container ship? Have we fierce patriotic pride in our container ships? Has somebody been sniffing glue?
Advertisement
Last week, the well-connected Conservative Tim Montgomerie reported that Sunak had taken to asking aides in Downing Street, “Am I not very good at this?” The answer is “no” but it’s also the wrong question. True, if the Conservative government were an aeroplane, then Sunak would be the pilot who is failing to keep it from plunging into the ocean. Yet for all his belated humility in channelling Taylor Swift — “it’s me, hi, I’m the problem it’s me” — shouldn’t the real blame fall on the actual plane? It was, after all, already on fire when he grabbed the yoke. It’s also full of passengers who keep ripping bits off it and using them to clobber each other.
Rishi? Listen. It’s not about you. The country wants change. I understand the fervent Tory hope for salvation via a Labour implosion. I also feel that at this stage Labour could be under the combined new leadership of, say, George Galloway and the Duke of York and the Conservatives still wouldn’t quite scrape their way to a hung parliament. Rachel Reeves could get a perm and start saying “We are a grandmother”. Emily Thornberry could have smoked a heroin bong with Zammo off Grange Hill. Angela Rayner could have embezzled a mansion with a moat and a duck island. It’s not enough.
Yesterday, a Yougov poll in this paper told us that 47 per cent of people would vote Labour at the next election even if the economy improves before then, which is only marginally less than the 50 per cent who will if it gets worse. That’s it, isn’t it? That’s the stench of Tory death.
Part of the rationale here lies in the gulf between what Sunak calls “the economy improving” and actual human people finding their own economic situation improving. “People are starting to feel better off,” insisted a Tory source. Yet when inflation comes down, which is the main achievement here, most of us don’t get richer. We just get poorer more slowly, which is hardly a feelgood situation. Post Brexit, post Covid, post hikes in energy, food and the cost of living, Britain remains in more of a feelbad situation. And more than anything, I expect, people just want it to end.
What the Conservatives now want to do is what they always want to do, which is pose as agents of change while remaining in charge. Yet the cupboard of ideas is bare, and not just for Sunak. You can see it even in the absurd discussion about changing leader, yet again, before the election. So many names and none of them are anything new.
Advertisement
Penny Mordaunt would be Theresa May again. Mmm. Exciting. Kemi Badenoch would be Sunak again, but even tetchier. Liz Truss or Boris Johnson again would literally be Liz Truss or Boris Johnson again; two such ludicrous ideas that I simply have nowhere to go with them, even in mockery. Even Nigel Farage would just be Brexit again. All of these things have been done already. Please. No more.
For all his disasters, then, Sunak should give himself a break. At this stage he is doing about as well as anyone was ever going to do, which is terribly. It’s not about the trousers that don’t reach his feet, or the flashes of fury, or the posters, or even the policies. It’s just everything. It’s just over. And before any one of his rivals imagines they could do a better job, they should walk a mile in his shoes. Not that he has, of course. They clearly just came out of the box.
