Rishi Sunak’s head-boy polish deserted him when he needed it most

As is perhaps less well known than it ought to be, Rishi Sunak was head boy at Winchester, and Wykehamists, as the products of this fine public school are known, are said to be marked by their exceptional politeness (“Manners makyth man” is the school’s charming ancient motto).

Sunak is no exception. Even when he tries to be rude, as when he “taunted” (I use the term advisedly) Keir Starmer as “Sir Softy” a few weeks ago, he doesn’t seem to have his heart in it. Or perhaps it was just a rubbish nickname. In any case, his gentle manners are not proving the asset they might be. He’s clever and competent all right, but maybe just a bit too... nice?

Faced with a mix of constructive and hostile questioning at the Commons liaison committee, which comprises the chairs of all the select committees, Sunak’s politesse never quite deserted him, but his usually sunny disposition sometimes did. At times, when he really needed to bite back a bit, his Wykehamist training seemed to restrain him from landing a killer blow, and instead he just deflated back into his seat, his face a portrait of bewilderment and pain.

Maybe tellingly, Sunak only really looked relaxed when he was answering William Wragg (constitutional affairs), who asked him a question about his own possibly imminent resignation honours list. Sunak looked super-embarrassed, as if he actually couldn’t wait to get the hell out of Westminster and back to America.

With the more well-behaved members of the committee, or when dealing with the few areas of policy that are going well, the prime minister was fine, even impressive. Bowled a few fairly softball questions by the likes of Greg Clark (science), Bob Neill (justice), Alicia Kearns (foreign affairs) and Steve Brine (health), Sunak was in his element.

This was the Rishi the Tories and the country – albeit to a declining extent – like. Left to his own devices, Sunak was able to put on his usual display of technocratic competence, replete with the kind of modish jargon he’s so fond of. Clark asked him what he thought was the biggest of the many big things artificial intelligence might do, and the prime minister happily schooled him in the “computational power of quantum” and the dangers of “capability overhangs”, whatever they are.

Where he wasn’t so much on it as all over the shop was when the more roughhouse members got their hands on him. The usually obscure Catherine McKinnell, for one – chair of the equally obscure petitions committee and Labour MP for Newcastle North. She laid into him like a geordie mum angry about hungry bairns, and Sunak literally didn’t know where to look. He reeled off the usual litany about the national minimum wage and the £900 bonus for people on social security, and she was having none of it.

In fact, Sunak was extremely lucky that she didn’t pick up on a stupid answer he gave that basically blamed the poor for wasting their money by not spending it on essentials such as food but “what they deem most important” (ie fags, booze and scratchcards, he didn’t quite say). Nor was Diane Johnson much impressed with Sunak’s attempts to waffle his way out of trouble on the refugee crisis. He was calm, as ever, but his demeanour was agitated – nervousness, embarrassment and awkwardness rolled into one squirming statesman.

Worst of all for Sunak was Chris Bryant, who’d left all the niceties outside the committee room and slammed him for not telling the Commons first about the NHS staff plan (shrewdly reading out the speaker’s devastating admonishment), and for not turning up to the vote on the privileges committee’s report about Boris Johnson. Clearly, these matters weren’t covered in Sunak’s briefing folder.

The prime minister made an excuse about attending a charity dinner, and tried to argue with Bryant about going to a Nato summit, but he really did resemble someone who had never been challenged like that since he was head boy at Winchester (which was odd, because of course he has been). The mention of Johnson drained the very spirit out of him.

In such circumstances, Sunak resembled nothing so much as a human laugh-cry emoji – still trying his best to maintain the nice smile, but contorted and discombobulated by the lack of deference afforded to him by Labour’s more forthright elements. During his questioning, he actually cycled through quite a few of the standard emojis – “nerd face”, “grimace face”, “unamused face”, “downcast face with sweat” – and then, the session declared almost over by chair Bernard Jenkin, the PM settled on one that’s not yet been patented: “doomed prime minister face”.