Rent-a-gob Rish! plays to the Tory echo chamber | John Crace

Appearances can be deceptive. When Rishi Sunak became prime minister last October he presented himself as a break from the past. Gone was the small island populism. Gone were the lies and half truths. Here was a moderate man who could be trusted not to crash the economy. A cosmopolitan politician who could be trusted not to embarrass us all on the global stage. A leader who might even occasionally put country before party.

Five months on and Rish! looks more and more to be the continuity candidate. A third-rate, ineffectual rent-a-gob who is most at home in the Tory echo chamber. Oblivious both to reality and his own failures. Weirdly, Conservative MPs love the new Sunak. They don’t want to face hard truths. That they are comfortably on course to lose the next election, leaving many of them out of a job. That their policies are failing. Have failed. That voters have finally run out of patience. After 13 years of Conservative government, no one can think of anything that works better than it did in 2010.

And Sunak has just gone along with it. The path of least resistance. He hasn’t bothered to stand up for what he believes, as it turns out he doesn’t actually believe in anything very much. He’s quite comfortable as he is – the cost of living crisis isn’t exactly biting in Downing Street – and just wants a quiet life. He’s tried being decent but that hasn’t worked out. There was never a bounce in the polls: everyone seemed to write him off from the start.

So now Rish! can be the hollow man he always was. A small man getting smaller by the day. More rightwing than many imagined and with limitless self-regard. No longer having to pretend to care about anything very much. Focused only on his own survival. Trying to eke out his time in No 10 for as long as possible. In denial that there isn’t a business in the country who thinks the Conservatives will win the next election.

Not even a veneer of morality left. What we get is the ultimate Goldman Sachs tech bro. Only out for himself, with other people merely collateral. Just another narcissist in a long line of narcissists. A man with a crocodile smile. With furtive eyes that suggest he doesn’t even trust himself. And when he turns up in the Commons for prime minister’s questions, the cheers from MPs are essentially for themselves. They are safe with a man without quality. One of their own.

Keir Starmer went hard on immigration. A sign of confidence. Jeremy Corbyn and Ed Miliband wouldn’t have gone anywhere near the subject. Miliband came under fire from his own party for having a mug with “Controls on Immigration” on the side. But the Labour leader believes he has a good story to tell voters on tackling the smuggling gangs.

Better still, he knows that the Tories’ own promises are in tatters. Countless initiatives, five bills, and more people arriving by small boats than ever before. Sunak is just about the only person in the entire country who believes his latest immigration bill will make a difference. And only then because his innate arrogance binds him into cognitive dissonance. He can’t bear the idea that something he dreamed up might be a crock of shit. Mental breakdown territory.

The Labour leader spelled out a few home truths. The Tories were just deluded. Even though they, themselves, were forced to admit there was a higher than 50% chance of the government losing in the international courts, Rish! and Suella Braverman were convinced their bill was going to succeed where all others had failed.

It was all just bonkers. There were no detention centre to keep all the arrivals in, no preparations for the inevitable legal challenges, no third-country agreements for deportation. Just some loud blasts on the dog-whistle. Nothing against foreigners, but enough was enough. It was a confected bill for confected outrage. A bill that would achieve nothing.

Sunak bounced up and down on his feet, thrilled to get the opportunity to cosplay the hard man in front of his own MPs. “We are compassionate and generous,” shouted Rish!. Sure. If it’s compassionate to make sure any asylum seeker that arrives by boat is bundled off to Rwanda. If it’s generous to already take fewer refugees than comparable European countries.

“STOP THE BOATS. STOP THE BOATS,” he shrieked. It wasn’t racist to say you didn’t want any more foreigners. Especially if you were compassionate to the pet foreigners who lived near you. People should be allowed to say what they want. Except for Gary Lineker. He should be made to shut up. Wrong opinions must not be heard. Can’t have a BBC football pundit sounding off. Though obviously it’s fine for the BBC chairman to bankroll the Tory party. No conflict of interest there.

“STOP THE BOATS. STOP THE BOATS.” Rish! had been to Dover and was thrilled to report he had told a foreigner to go home. To his face. And he’d punctured his boat. So hard! We might or might not leave the European convention on human rights. Who cared? The Tory MPs were in raptures. Music to their mean-spirited ears. Just what the voters wanted. Except it wasn’t. As Starmer gently pointed out, they wanted a humane policy that worked to counter the people traffickers. They were fed up with Tory white noise.

The SNP’s Stephen Flynn also piled in. Didn’t Sunak feel a flicker of shame that on International Women’s Day he was effectively saying that women who were trafficked as sex slaves could not expect a safe home in the UK? Rish! was pumped. That was exactly what he was saying. Nothing to do with us. And for that matter, Mo Farah could do one, too. What had he ever done for the UK? Take, take, take. Foreigners all over.

Conservative headbanger Natalie Elphicke wanted to ban the French. President Macron was on a Calais beach pushing migrants towards us. This had to stop, too. Rish! couldn’t disguise his pleasure. Against all the odds, people were taking his bill seriously. As though, it could actually work! Of course it couldn’t. It was all just meta. Potemkin Politics. A top day at the office.