New UK PM has little to say but much to do

At the time this column was being written, Rishi Sunak, the UK’s brand new prime minister, was probably putting on his finest threads for his first audience with King Charles III.

One hopes the king will have been coached not to wound his latest PM — who, by the way, is much, much richer than he is, and that takes some doing — with the same careless “dear, oh dear” comments he uttered to previous incumbent Liz Truss, who now returns to parliament’s back benches in a stinking cloud of humiliation.

Not that Sunak seems to worry too much about what people say of him. It is hard to tell, because he has been, at least in recent days, quite tight-lipped himself.

Whether this is because he has realised that keeping his words clipped means there is little for the wolves to feast on, or because he has realised that the light at the end of the tunnel is, in fact, the brakeless runaway train that is Great Britain, is uncertain.

Sunak’s first task will be to quell the restive Conservative Party, which is staggering around and bleeding profusely from multiple self-inflicted stab wounds. 

Then he has to fix the country, restore market confidence and try to assure Britons that their newly expensive mortgage payments and the prospect that thousands of their compatriots may freeze to death this winter will have been worth the turmoil in Westminster. 

The UK is now at the edge of the cliff. It is not impossible that, come the grinding winter, news broadcasts will show footage of desperate Britons trying to cross the Channel to France in leaky inflatable boats in a grotesque reimagining of the Dunkirk myth.