TWO rich men – one possessed of unfathomable wealth, the other of unfathomable ego – appear on TV together and shake hands on a £1,000 bet about whether any migrants will be sent to Rwanda before the general election.
The deeply moneyed man looks a tad uncomfortable about this wager, as well he might, as he is meant to be the prime minister, after all. The other, being Piers Morgan, looks horribly pleased with himself as he sweats under the studio lights.
Two rich men sparring on a tacky TV talk show make light of the fate awaiting some of the world’s most disadvantaged people. Two rich men making a rotten poor show of themselves.
One of them does this dispiriting stuff for a living, so it’s not surprising. The other is meant to be running the country.
Is that where we’re now at? Even those of us who can’t bear Rishi Sunak’s tinpot populism may have wondered why he agreed to go on that show. It was an old promise, apparently. Well, the mistaken princeling walked into that one, and once the saloon doors shut behind him, he foundered like the flattest of fish.
A thousand quid is nothing to Sunak. If someone stuck a grand on the pavement to fool him, he’d not even notice such a puny sum. Well, he doesn’t seem to have noticed that the Rwanda scheme has already cost us £400m – without a single refugee being sent there.
It’s all a heartless gimmick designed to make us feel all our problems are down to those disadvantaged people who risk their lives trying to cross the channel. They have long been treated as meaningless pawns in a game they don’t understand. And now the prime minister and a TV host have had a £1,000 bet about their fate.
Sunak is said to be a great admirer of Margaret Thatcher. My own hostility to Mrs Hacksaw is ancient and to the bone, but I’ll grant you this: no way would she have stooped so low.
A cheap stunt from Sunak in what must surely be the last-hope casino. At least that’s how it looks to me, which is why I stopped doing something else to write this in a dispirited flurry of finger bashing.
Hope you don’t mind…