So much for holding your nerve. Rishi Sunak appears to have lost his. He looks beaten. The man who has lived his entire life in a gilded protective cage – Winchester head boy, Oxford, Goldman Sachs, the Tory party – is now powerless to stave off defeat. The real world has finally caught up with him. Or he with it. There are no easy fixes. Only barely managed decline. It’s no longer a question of if he fails. The only game in town is when.
You can sense the despair in Sunak’s body language. His shoulders are hunched. A small man making himself even smaller. His eyes look sunken, half dead. His speech reduced to a tired monotone. His repartee shot to pieces: neither funny nor clever. Deep down, somewhere in the hell that is his subconscious, he knows the game is up.
