Remember this?
Now, more than any time in our recent history, we will be judged by our capacity for compassion.
Our ability to come through this, won’t just be down to what government or business can do, but by the individual acts of kindness we show one another.
The small business who does everything they can not to lay off their staff.
The student who does a shop for their elderly neighbour.
The retired nurse who volunteers to cover some shifts in their local hospital.
When this is over, and it will be over, we want to look back at this moment and remember the many small acts of kindness done by us and to us.
We want to look back this time and remember how we thought first of others and acted with decency.
We want to look back on this time and remember how, in the face of a generation-defining moment, we undertook a collective national effort - and we stood together.
That was the chancellor, Rishi Sunak, on 20 March 2020, ending a speech introducing further measures to support people, jobs and businesses during the Covid pandemic.
Commentators praised his delivery, and remarked that he had found the words we wanted to hear from our leaders at that worrying time. By contrast, it was noted, Boris Johnson, then the prime minister and supposedly a skilled orator, had failed to provide them.
If there ever was Rishi-mania, March 2020 is when you would have found it.
OK, so the words were written for him, but he did deliver them well. And he was a world away from the Sunak of today, who learns a short statement off pat and then repeats it whatever questions the journalists ask him.
He appears to have been media-trained to within an inch of his life. I am reminded of the England cricket team under the previous regime, when interviews with the players about about anything even slightly controversial took much the same form.
Or it may be that Sunak was kidnapped by aliens at some point after March 2020 and replaced with one of their own who has been engineered to look like him.
After his performance with Laura Kuenssberg this morning, I am leaning towards the latter explanation.
2 comments:
I think it's worth remembering that Rushi's rise to prominence was positively meteoric. His first kind of government appointment was as a Parliamentary Under-Secretary (the lowest ministerial grade) in June 2018 from which he was appointed to second in charge at the treasury the following summer after Johnson's victory. I remember people saying they were not at all sure he was ready for such a big promotion at the time. Then, just 6 months later, the chancellor resigns and he becomes the most senior minister in government, and then a month after that he faces one of the most momentous moments for a chancellor in modern times. My own sense of the change we have seen was that 2020 Rishi really hadn't had time to become indoctrinated in the way that government happens and so likely was responding in quite a genuine human manner to the exceptional circumstances we all found ourselves in. 3 years on however, the political machine has rather caught up with him and he likely feels a lot safer hiding behind his advisors and media consultants
I think that's fair comment, SJ.
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