Phil McDuff: Wild how nobody in the media ever seems to come back with the answer "he's no worse at it than he was two years ago when we were making Dishy Rishi posts and drawing him in a superman costume, it's just he's now fair game."

Wild how nobody in the media ever seems to come back with the answer "he's no worse at it than he was two years ago when we were making Dishy Rishi posts and drawing him in a superman costume, it's just he's now fair game."

In which I attempt to answer the Great Question Of The Election: how is Rishi Sunak so bad at this? thecritic.co.uk/the-rise-and...

The rise and fall of Rishi | Robert Hutton | The Critic Magazinethecritic.co.uk How is Rishi Sunak so bad at this? Having posed the question some months ago, it’s time to have a crack at answering it. The election campaign has left little dispute about his lack of political nous…

Weird how someone can just magically go from being the super competent saviour of the country to an out of touch asshole. Someone should look into that.

Let's look who we were comparing him to in the competence stakes. Liz Truss and Boris Johnson. He probably still wins that contest

Come on man

Oh, he's terrible. I think it was wishful thinking on the Tories part that he was going to be their saviour. Because they only care about their own skins.

Yeah but the point is that the press are not, theoretically, meant to be part of the Tory party.

The problem when rich people own everything.

To be fair, Rishi is maybe a little bit better than a lettuce.

dunno if Hutton has ever called him super competent

Hey man I guess I was probably talking about the press in general but thanks for pedantically going to bat for someone who writes for The Critic lol.

I mean, I hate the Critic, but Hutton seems ok.

Yet he is still pontificating on this without mentioning the press at all. Almost as if even the "ok" ones know what not to say unbidden.

This is why if the Tories do end up with like a couple dozen seats I’m going to break my “less politics after the election” rule because I think it’s worth interrogating what’s different now compared to 2019 (it’s the media actually noticing things we’d been saying for 9 years by that point)

“Why did the press suddenly feel it necessary to relay that the Tories are a bunch of charlatans?” Seems a more relevant and urgent question than anything to do with Rishi Sunak’s abilities or otherwise. Especially with an authoritarian right wing movement about to replaced them in government.

Replace*

because the only alternative is a neolib who won't rock the boat. capital has a safe alternative that won't do anything crazy like "make normal people's lives better" so the current lot are now fair game

This and the press has an ideological investment in Starmer's success since any success he has will justify removing the left from electoral politics entirely.

My guess is they would have propped up Starmer as the next PM sooner, but COVID struck, and they realised how catastrophic it could potentially be to spread distust of the government handling. Explains the Starmer "Forensic" meme, when he was barely challenging the government line.

Oh no I think they believe that. The libs do, anyway. Tone not content, remember?

I think that is THE question tbh. Why did they suddenly remember parties they were at one year later?

For much the same reason that there's a bigger deal being made out of a couple of dodgy bets than out of the crisis in local government funding: it's a very specific scandal that you can use against your enemies that doesn't implicate the bigger picture at all.

I get that. That specific issue will take my local government job soon enough. I just wonder what it was that made them notice even those things. Cos Starmer wasn't given a rough time early, but it wasn't a rosy one. At what point did they think, "We've promoted Johnson too far!"?

It would be interesting (and this is just a hunch so don't expect anything to come of it) to look into the timing of partygate becoming a live issue and Labour changing its internal election rules.

Parties that were on the public record during that year, with remarkably little comment.

Well you're never going to see a joke paper like The Critic make that point

Very true

That would involve showing people how the sausage is made and undermining the racket so obviously it’s never going to happen.

You years ago is a long time in politics

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