Labour’s leaders do not rate Rishi Sunak. I don’t mean by this that they think his policies range from the wrongheaded to the disastrous – we can take these opposition criticisms as a given. I mean that as professional politicians they look at the Prime Minister and see a rank amateur.
‘He’s rubbish,’ a member of the shadow cabinet told me. ‘I mean’ he continued bursting into derisory laughter during his speech yesterday, ‘what the hell was that maths thing about?’
In case you missed it, from the morning papers through to lunchtime on Wednesday, the PM’s New Year message was that he wanted children to study maths until they were 18. Leave aside that we do not have enough maths teachers as it is, and that, even if we did, they would soon be on strike, and focus on the frivolity of making a vague announcement about an unfunded programme for teaching teenagers in the middle of a national emergency.
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