POLITICAL SURVIVAL

• POLITICAL 

There are times when a political ‘joke’ turns out to be no joke but a lethal and unsurvivable attack and I think we are seeing one being made at the moment on Rishi Sunak.

The joke is about his diminutive appearance.   I do not know if he actually lacks inches but it is true that he has an immature image.  He looks as if he is a teenager who has not yet grown  to his full height .   For the political smear to be damaging it has to be in part true.

I laughed when I heard one commentator say that Downing Street no longer needed  somebody to open the door for the Prime Minister to enter N o 10;  he would go in through the cat flap.   There is a feline quality about Sunak :  you can imagine him cleaning his paws,   and carrying the mouse he’d caught back to a quiet place to devour it in peace.

This is very unkind, and once this thought is established, everybody just sees him as a cat, or as a teenage boy and there’s an end of him.   I heard John Bishop; say that we should not blame him for not wearing his seat belt; his aides had forgotten to bring his booster seat.

Someone else who died by ridicule was David Steel, who was at the time Leader of the Liberal party.   He was depicted as being a small toy or puppet perhaps being carried around in David Owen’s pocket.    The toy David Steel would anxiously question  Owens about their safety.    There was nothing safe about Owens (Roy Jenkins described him as ‘a tree in whose shadow nothing would grow’) but there was in the real David Steel’s voice a quality of anxious interrogation which the  voters’ recognized and Steel found himself no longer taken seriously as a politician.

A cat may be a sumptuous beauty but in reality it is a ruthless killer, so perhaps there is more hope for Sunak than there was for Steel..