Whisper it, but Rishi Sunak has had a good week

If you have been doing as badly as Rishi Sunak has as prime minister, then it doesn’t take much to register a notable improvement.

Yet there is no point in his detractors denying that over the past week he has done just that. First, he got stuck into the issue of Britain’s burgeoning ‘sick note culture’.

Left-wing brickbats predictably followed. Lib Dem leader Ed Davey accused him of ‘attempting to blame the British people for his own government’s failures’, while Labour’s Matthew Pennycook complained that he was pursuing a ‘cheap headline’.

But headlines are headlines and if they are cheap then so much the better in these cash-strapped days. Most people will have agreed with Sunak. Especially most of those remotely open to the idea of voting Conservative at the next election.

Then House of Lords resistance to the Rwanda Bill was finally crushed by Sunak and the measure was granted royal assent.