Sunak’s self-deprecating joke at PMQs was a reminder he was popular once

It’s going to be difficult to explain to our grandchildren how politics used to work. I can’t imagine sitting little Ryan Coogan III down on my knee and trying to impress upon him that, yes, politicians have always taken little jabs at each other, but they used to stop short of going full Regina George.

We’ll have to tell them that, ever since the one-two punch of self-immolation that was Brexit/Trump in 2016, public discourse has taken a real downturn, with politicians no longer able or willing to hide their disdain for one another. Brexit might be a little tricky to explain since the EU will be long gone by then, but I imagine they’ll know who Trump is, since his head will still be ruling the American Empire from within its jar of life-sustaining nutri-fluid.

What will be really hard to get across, though, is that those people who go on television and call each other names for a living used to actually be capable of a degree of civility.

We had a little glimpse of that today, during Keir Starmer’s first PMQs as prime minister. As Starmer sent his best wishes to the Team GB athletes heading to the Paris Olympics, the former PM said: “Although, to be honest, I’m probably not the first person they want to hear advice from on how to win” – to a chorus of chuckles.

It was a nice little moment of self-deprecation from a man who often seemed totally incapable of introspection while in office.

What happened to the man who yelled misleading figures over the moderator during every head-to-head election debate? The man who coined “Sir Softie”, a nickname for Starmer so lame and ineffective that all it did was remind voters his opponent had received one of the country’s highest honours? The man who made a joke about trans people in the Commons that would have been disgusting even if it hadn’t been made in the presence of the mother of a murdered trans teenager, which it was?

It seems that being out of office is doing Sunak almost as much good as it’s doing the rest of us. He’s mellowed out in his soon-to-be-retirement, and seems comfortable taking shots at himself that he wouldn’t have dreamed of a few weeks ago.

I was a little worried that he’d take the Liz Truss route, where the sting of defeat would cause him to ingratiate himself with the right-wing American media ecosystem and start banging on about the “deep state” sabotaging his otherwise perfect political record. Or the Boris Johnson route of seeking out sad photo ops with Donald Trump that end up looking like the former president is visiting a dodgy discount wax museum.

It’s a far cry from the old days. Remember when John McCain was confronted during the 2008 election campaign by a woman who said she wouldn’t be voting for Obama because he was an “Arab”? And the late senator defended his opponent as a “decent family man”? Sure, it’s not great to draw a dichotomy between “Arabs” and “decent family men”, but it was still a lot better than in 2016, when discourse had soured so much that even McCain found himself accusing the former president of being “directly responsible” for the Orlando nightclub shooting (comments that he would later walk back).

Maybe it’s a lot to put on a brief joke, but seeing PMQs open with some good-natured joshing, instead of the usual vitriol and shouting, was heartening – although, to be fair, they got to the vitriol and shouting eventually.

For a vanishingly brief moment, it felt like the old days, when politics may still have been a corrupt, embarrassing mess, but at least it was a civilised corrupt, embarrassing mess. It gave me the tiniest, vaguest hope that maybe we can get back there one day – if not in my lifetime, then maybe in little Ryan Coogan III’s.

I won’t get my hopes up too high, though. I doubt it’ll last.