Rishi Sunak can’t save Britain

The Tories have hit an all-time low: an Ipsos poll shows the party on a dismal twenty per cent, with the percentage of under-35s intending to vote for them in single figures. Never has a flush looked quite so busted as Rishi Sunak.

It was against this bleak backdrop that the Prime Minister’s lectern was trundled on to Downing Street on Friday night. There was something about the suddenness and urgency of this occasion – asking the press to assemble just as the pubs fill up at the start of the weekend – that put a little spring in the heart. After months of blatant antisemitism on the streets, and now with the intimidation of MPs by Islamists and their fellow travellers, was the PM finally going to actually do something?

I should have known better than to think so. That lectern is wheeled out far too readily nowadays, debasing its own coinage.