Rishi Sunak’s cunning plan to cure the economy of all the problems he has caused - Vladimir McTavish

I found out something remarkable this Wednesday. Apparently Rishi Sunak is still Prime Minister. Since taking charge of the country in October, the man has been virtually invisible.

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak arrives to deliver his first major domestic speech of the year at Plexal, Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park on January 4

The UK changed PM so often in the course of 2022, without the public having any say in the matter, I had assumed that someone else had been given the job.

As he hadn’t been seen since the autumn, I had reckoned that Conservative backbenchers had become tired of a life of tedious normality and voted to replace him with someone more sociopathic or unhinged in order to keep us all entertained through the dark days of winter.

Sunak is, of course, best known as the guy who found piles of cash behind the sofa during the pandemic, to pay all of us to not go to work. He then conjured up millions of ten-pound meal vouchers which encouraged us all to pile into busy restaurants and give a much-needed kick start to the second wave of Covid.

Like a lot of stage magicians, Sunak has a slightly unreal look to him, slightly robotic in appearance. Were someone to tell me that he didn’t actually exist but that he had been created by CGI, I would actually believe them. After all, I’ve only ever seen him on TV.

Anyway, the life-size Thunderbird puppet popped up a few days ago to present his daring five-point plan to see us all through 2023. So it would appear that he is still in post and still paying cursory attention to the chaos going on throughout the land.

But only to a certain extent. For, if his start-of-the-year statement is anything to go by, he appears to have been living in Cloud Cuckoo Land these past three months.

Here are Plastic Rishi’s pledges in full:

To half inflation, thereby solving a problem that he himself created.

To stimulate growth in the economy, the lack of growth of which is totally his legacy.

To cut NHS waiting times, again overlooking the fact that the current state of the health service is a direct result of twelve-and-a-half years of savage cuts to public spending carried out on the watch of him and his cronies.

To make striking illegal, in the face of demands for public sector workers for higher pay to manage to live through a cost of living crisis caused by, er, Rishi Sunak.

To make it illegal to enter the UK by crossing the Channel is a small boat without a passport. Which, correct me if I’m wrong, is already illegal.

I get why the Tories chose Sunak. After a year in which the increasingly erratic and palpably dishonest Boris Johnson was followed by Liz Truss, a zealot who was utterly out of her depth, they opted for Mr Boring. But then there is a difference between boring and invisible.

Throughout Britain, people are rightly angry about taking real-terms pay cuts and are taking action as a result. At times like this, it is government’s job to intervene, not to disappear.

It is high time for the Prime Minister to do one final conjuring act and to make himself reappear and to do the job he was elected to do. Hang on, none of us elected him to do it. Now that’s some trick!