From the diary of Rishi Sunak, Britain’s most compromising prime minister
IT’S a diplomatic triumph. Ursula from the EU said so. ‘Well done,’ my wife says. ‘You mended the thing that everybody bloody hates.’
‘It’s been a lot of hard work,’ I admitted, wondering why recognition of my achievement had been so grudging. ‘Hard work which Starmer won’t have to do,’ Akshata says. ‘Why are you so stupid?
‘Nobody hugs the man who fixed the toilet,’ she continues. ‘Nobody cheers the man who gets Channel 5 back on air. I guess it needed doing, but a triumph? Hardly. Congratulations. You are the guy who mended the thing that is fundamentally broken.
‘Literally the only point of Brexit was to turn Britain into a tax haven so I could feel safe leaving a few hundred million here. And with the pound and the taxes? Guess what? I don’t.’
‘It was the will of the people,’ I say, knowing that if Akshata has a flaw it’s her distance from the common man. Bless her, she didn’t have the proletarian upbringing I had, in that rough-and-ready Southampton pharmacy, playing racecars on the floor with anti-depressants.
‘It was the will of the rich people,’ she counters. ‘Dad was on the conference call with Murdoch and the rest in 2015. If it had worked out, fine. It didn’t, and that’s going to take more fixing than a Northern Ireland patch unless you hadn’t noticed.’
‘Still,’ I say, asserting dominance and implicitly dismissing her conspiracy talk, which is too ridiculous to believe, ‘it’ll give me a boost in the polls. The man who tamed the ERG.’
‘The bloody polls tamed the bloody ERG,’ she responds. ‘They still hate this shitty hotchpotch of a deal, but they’re chronically unemployable and about to lose their seats.
‘Honey, nobody gives a fuck for Northern Ireland and nobody wants Brexit. You’re only doing the job because Truss failed. Call an election so we can all go home.’