Yes, Rishi Sunak’s wealth is a problem

The Tories are finally coming to see what has long been plain to the rest of us: Rishi Sunak is a dud. He’s not a walking catastrophe like Liz Truss but he’s hopelessly out of touch, helplessly out of his depth and has no plan for turning things around. His conversation with a homeless man at a shelter, in which the Prime Minister chirpily enquired whether the bloke was a business owner, has been somewhat misrepresented by Labour and its colleagues in the activist media. Sunak did not blurt out his silly question from nowhere: the man had been questioning him about his management of the economy and the benefits to London of a booming financial sector.

Still, unless the PM suspected he was in a very tasteless episode of The Secret Millionaire, it was absurd to ask a man queuing for free Christmas scran about commerce and finance. James Forsyth, formerly of this parish, will still be finding his feet in No.