Come July, Rishi Sunak can watch all the Sky TV he wants

Rishi Sunak’s background was always going to stop him from connecting with people, says Jacob (Picture: Leon Neal/Getty Images)

Even weighing up the decidedly ‘meh’ options facing us at the General Election next month – I’m always reluctant to romanticise the politicians of my millennial youth. 

I’m no apologist for Tony Blair and Gordon Brown’s New Labour project, and I firmly believe that David Cameron’s austerity-obsessed Conservative cabinet was one of the most damaging governments that the country has ever had.

But one thing I can say about all of Blair, Cameron and Brown, is that I didn’t know intimate details of their childhoods. I didn’t know what their parents did for a living, and I certainly had no idea how many channels they had on their TV. 

But just three weeks on from Rishi Sunak’s rain-soaked launch of a snap General Election campaign, both Labour and Tory leaders seem determined to beat us over the head with their ‘stories’, the tedious details of their upbringings and how they were ‘shaped’ by them. 

I’m sick to the back teeth of it, and I’m certain that I’m not the only one. 

If I was a student I’m sure there’d be a decent drinking game in taking a shot every time Starmer mentions his father being a toolmaker or hearing so much about the Sunak family pharmacy that you feel like you should be invited to their Christmas party. 

You’d get pretty sick pretty quickly playing that game, but for now the only thing making me nauseous is hearing both of the candidates for Prime Minister trying to win favour by reminding us of their parents’ jobs every second sentence. 

And now Rishi Sunak has gone a step further, tugging at the heartstrings and trying to win the public’s sympathy by revealing that, as a child, he was so hard up that he had to go without, wait for it, Sky Television. 

Yep, you read that right. Not food, not heating, not clothes, but a way to watch new episodes of the Simpsons and the early days of the Premier League.

It just proves that these absurd, X-Factor style life stories politicians are determined to tell us in a bid to win our votes are always going to fall flat.

More specifically, it just proves how chronically bad Rishi Sunak is at politics, and how his background was always going to stop him from connecting with people. 

Fresh from criticism for missing part of the D-Day commemorations, Sunak revealed he instead had media obligations with ITV.

A week on, we find out those media obligations involved him trying to garner sympathy by telling us that his parents had to make the unenviable Sophie’s Choice of affording tuition fees for his private school, Winchester College, versus Sky TV. 

Obviously, prices have changed since Sunak’s childhood, but a quick Google tells me that Winchester currently charges almost £50,000 a year in fees, with Sky TV packages starting at just £26 a month. 

I’m no economist, but something doesn’t add up here, and it isn’t just the sums in Sunak’s manifesto.

Rishi Sunak and his wife are worth £651m and he made millions working at a firm accused of helping to trigger the UK’s financial crash, so it’s obvious he’s out of touch. 

But surely he has a team around him? A team of highly-paid, expensively-educated advisors who could have told him that the UK might not empathise with Sunak’s ‘plight’ in childhood.

It’s laughable, like so much of his campaign. 

The country is in crisis. Our children aren’t struggling because they don’t have Sky TV, they’re struggling because they don’t have food. 

Rishi and his party seem to be having an identity crisis where they seem bizarrely ignorant of just how badly he is viewed by the general public. 

There was never any way that the country was going to feel any level of sympathy towards the upbringing of that man. All it does is underline the fact that he is so far out of touch he can’t even conceive of managing a household budget when times are tough.

Sunak proved that again when, on top of this strange interview, he tweeted yesterday ‘You will always be better at spending your own money than the government is.’ 

Hasn’t Sunak’s party been the government for the past 14 years? If he doesn’t think he’s any good at spending our money, why does he want us to give him another term in office to do so?

Perhaps at some point he’ll have an astonishing moment of clarity when the impact of his immense wealth, privilege, and bad decisions finally dawns on him.

Perhaps, once he’s been on the end of a historic thrashing in the election, he will realise that, regardless of whether his family had Sky or ‘council TV,’ he was never going to connect with the general public. 

Sunak is the elite, he doesn’t deserve any of our sympathies, and in a few weeks time, hopefully he and his party will be gone, and he’ll have more free time to watch whichever kind of television he pleases.

Do you have a story you’d like to share? Get in touch by emailing jess.austin@metro.co.uk. 

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