I didn’t expect to be writing a column this week, but I had a message from someone who “claimed to have ‘powers’” – I think it might have been the editor – telling me that it was about time I got on with it. “You’re living the life I can’t”, she said. “Now write me a thousand words on Prince Harry and Rishi Sunak. That’s the life I want for you.”
Prince Harry’s revelations
This week has seen Prince Harry reveal that he too has received messages from mysterious powers, alongside numerous other disclosures in his new autobiography. The Mirror provided a succinct summary: “I took cocaine, killed 25 Taliban and lost virginity in field behind pub”, which sounds like quite a good night out.
In an interview with Times Radio, Major General Chip Chapman criticised Harry for revealing details of his kills in Afghanistan, warning that he had “opened himself up to every nutcase out there”, such as the ones at the Mail, the Express and the Sun.
It’s hard to overstate the reality meltdown the newspapers seem to have had on reading Harry’s memoirs. I saw less-extreme reactions in Raiders of the Lost Ark when the Nazis opened up the Ark. The Express’s headline said that Harry had ‘sold his soul’, which displays the usual sense of proportion. Meanwhile, the Mail called Harry a ‘grudge-toting manbaby’ on its front page, with just the first seventeen pages of the paper being filled with articles, comment and analysis about Harry. All perfectly normal. I’m sure the Mail doesn’t hold a grudge about any libel cases Harry has brought against it.
Do the maths
Although Harry claims to have killed 25 Taliban, doubt has been cast upon the accuracy of this figure. If only he’d done maths up until the age of 18, which is Rishi Sunak’s latest brainfart to attempt to solve the problems in the UK.
Rampant inflation, poverty-inducing energy bills, most of our public services on strike, and the NHS on the verge of collapse after more than a decade of under-investment, and Sunak’s answer is to make everyone do maths for a bit longer. That way, we can all be investment bankers and hedge fund managers. After that, we can all be prime minister too. Problem solved.
In response to the maths suggestion, the Telegraph decided to provide a few maths questions that it thought every adult should be able to answer, including this gem:
“There’s a sale on at your favourite clothes shop – 25% off all knitwear, 20% off trousers with an extra 10% off if your final discounted shop goes over £100. You’ve seen a jumper for £70, some slacks for £60. Do you also need to buy that knitted waistcoat to get your extra 10% off?”
The answer is, of course, that you don’t care, because you apparently own a time-machine capable of taking you back to the previous century, when you could still buy ‘slacks’ and a ‘knitted waistcoat’.
Another question that might have been included is: if you have three prime ministers and four chancellors in one year, how much of a pay rise could nurses have had with the tens of billions you wasted trashing the economy?
Sunak’s promises
To be fair to Sunak, he did come up with some other quarter-arsed ideas to go alongside his mathematical one. For instance, he pledged to halve inflation from its current level. That’s nice. It should bring it down to double what it was before he became chancellor.
His other promises included getting the economy growing, reducing national debt and cutting NHS waiting lists. All of those pledges rather gloss over who has been running the country for the last 12 years and caused all those problems in the first place. And really, those sort of pledges should be seen as the minimum level of competence you might expect from your government. What does he want? A round of applause? Or is that just for nurses?
Sadly, his promises amount to little more than saying that the Conservatives won’t make things worse than they already are. I can’t help thinking I’ve heard all this before from all the other Tory prime ministers we’ve had in the last 12 years. How many is it now? Four? Five? I knew I should have done maths for longer.
Psychic powers
In response, the Labour leader, Sir Keir Starmer, presented his own policy speech the following day. The speech was just “empty slogans, uncontrolled spending, and no detailed plan to secure the future prosperity of Britain”, according to a Tory spokesperson. “And all those are normally our territory”, they didn’t add.
Starmer was “failing to mention how he will cut crime, crack down on illegal migration and reduce borrowing”, continued the spokesperson for the party that has overseen big increases in crime, migration and borrowing. You’d think with their grasp of mathematics the Tories would be able to spot that. Then again, perhaps someone with psychic powers could also let them know what a 20-point deficit in the polls signifies. You don’t need a maths A-level to figure that one out.
