Verb Tense
Prime Minister Sunak is having a dreadful week.
We Brits have over 500 words for 'drunk.' We don't just get drunk, but battered, sozzled, smashed, and inebriated. An exuberant night on the sauce leads one to get wankered, sloshed, or gazeboed.
Each new term enters the lexicon as a byword for dilapidation occasioned by hubris. We know to where that seventh tequila will lead. 'One more won't hurt,' soon becomes, 'Mate, I'm sorry. I know it's your livelihood. I know. How much to clean up the back seat? Are you sure it's my vomit? Sorry. You're not having me on, are you? No. That's £150, you say. Okay. I'm sorry. So sorry. Do you take card? Sorry.'
Few plan to get paralytic, arseholed, steam-pigged, or wrecked. It just happens. Despite repeated failures, we attempt to tame the untameable. Alcohol and hubris go together like gin and tonic.
At least those regrettable incidents seldom leave a scar. True and permanent failure warrants a euphemism. As you know, 'Doing a Ratner' means to destroy one's business via loose lips. Such terms warn us from history against the perils of vanity, vice, pride, and hubris.
Prime Minister Sunak doesn't drink. But he is the high priest of hubris.
This week on the campaign trail might just enter the political history books. Rishi Sunak, the man who themed his cheese-melting campaign on national pride and security, slipped off home early from the D-Day commemorations in France.
World leaders gathered at the event on Thursday to honour the eightieth anniversary of the Normandy landings. You know, the one attended by a dwindling platoon of demigod veterans in what might be the final year graced by their presence. To riot in understatement, this Irish goodbye was inadvisable. Sunak might as well have fed Dame Judi Dench to a ravenous gang of XL bullies.
Our prime minister is one of life's thoroughbred winners. From one of the most exclusive schools in the country, Sunak went on to Oxford and then to Stanford university. Cultured in our meritocratic petri-dish, Sunak has never failed a thing in his 44 years. Until now.
Twenty-odd points behind Sir Keir Starmer's Labour, Sunak is on course to finish third in a two-horse race.
It gets worse. This week, Nigel Farage announced he would stand for election as the Reform Party candidate in Clacton. That Essex seat is the living, breathing symbol of pissed-off, left-behind, white-working-class, fucking furious Great Britain.
The polls have broken Tory brains. Clamped around the Conservative Party's noodle neck is Reform's roid-head paws. The right-wing upstarts trail the Tories by just two points. And that was before Sunak committed the social equivalent of tarmacking over the Princess Diana memorial garden on Mothering Sunday.
Sunak is a one-colour pie chart of hubris. After losing the Tory leadership election to the ludicrous Liz Truss, Sunak got handed the top job by knowing the right string-pullers.
Breathless commentary from back then christened Sunak as a Silicon Valley start-up guru, furnishing the boy wonder with LinkedIn adjectives such as 'brilliant' and 'dynamic.'
Sunak parrots the pediculous babble beloved of that skulk of Babbitts. With blue-sky thinking, and by sticking to core competencies, Sunak has a plan to deliver. He promised to run Britain like a start-up. On that account, he has delivered. Over one-third of start-ups crash and burn within two years.
What went wrong? Sunak's indulgent reboots have crashed his operating system. Not so long ago, he was an anti-woke culture warrior reeling off tiresome jibes about trans people. Then came spartan Sunak, trusted centurion of the Telegraph comment section.
Too late. For the best part of two years, Sunak has circulated in meme-form around this teetering island, his existence a boundless source of second-hand embarrassment and ridicule.
With each reboot, Sunak sunk further. Ordinary people have a radar for bullshit. They don't see such shapeshifting as necessary brand correction to meet market demands. They see duplicity and serpentine salesmanship bordering on fraud. In the plain English of my council-estate youth: Sunak is full of shit.
With his wings smeared in beeswax, Rishi Sunak is Icarus. And Nigel Farage is the sun.
Farage is more than the sun. Farage is Wetherspoon Man.
During his visit to Clacton, Farage fittingly visited a Wetherspoon pub. For the unfamiliar, Wetherspoon pubs owe their undeniable success to their reliability and recognition. Wherever you may be in Britain, you know what you'll get in one of Wetherspoons' 800-odd cavernous boozers: A decent burger, chips, and a pint for half an hour on the minimum wage, alongside cheap, cheap booze.
Critics scoff. But they'll never find a Wetherspoon empty at any time of day or on any day of the week.
Farage announced his plans and doubled the Reform vote in Clacton. His appeal relies on the Wetherspoon model. Farage is the same wherever he may be and to whomever he may talk. Dressed like a hobbyist gamekeeper, he sinks pints, smokes fags, and cracks jokes. 'Nigel' says what a sizeable swathe of left-behind Britain thinks and wants to hear.
His many detractors don't get it. How can a privately educated former metals trader claim to speak for the people? For the same reason that populist parties are lapping at the walls of power across Europe: their erstwhile champions are too busy peacocking their pronouns in their Twitter bios.
That's not to say the Reform Party answers any of our questions. Their miracle cure for emphysema is a lungful of unfiltered Thatcherite economics. And yet, none of that matters a jot. Nigel Farage speaks a language known by few and heard by all.
Maybe Sunak will make history. Or at least the historical record of words—the dictionary. The latest entry: 'Doing a Sunak' — To fail miserably through arrogance and hubris.
I have submitted "Do a Sunak" as a new entry in the Urban Dictionary.
“And that was before Sunak committed the social equivalent of tarmacking over the Princess Diana memorial garden on Mothering Sunday.”
This has been amusing me for coming up 20 hours now. Outstanding.