Meat Tax? Compulsory car sharing? Seven different bins? All scrapped! But hold on…

It must be assumed to have been Team Sunak’s idea to usher the BBC’s Nick Robinson into the “Thatcher Room” at Downing Street. It could hardly have been a more generous act of hosting, providing as it did a truly unimprovable introduction to a 15 minute interview that only went further downhill from there.

Last week, when Rishi Sunak announced he wasn’t going to bother going to the United Nations General Assembly – as almost every prime minister before him has done, every year – a very old clip started to do the rounds of Margaret Thatcher, addressing said General Assembly 30 years ago, telling the world it had to come together and take drastic action on climate change.

And here was Rishi Sunak: not in New York, but in Downing Street, doing his best to try and place some kind of limit on the catastrophic consequences of his decision the day before, to announce he was cancelling the only thing for which an almost unanimously hostile public still gives him and his party credit – its ambitious targets for decarbonisation.

And here he was, sitting in the Thatcher Room, having Thatcher’s speech calmly read out to him. Wednesday’s speech had already been dead on arrival, already disowned by the car industry, the energy industry and half his own MPs. This 15 minutes with the Today programme was its open casket funeral.

It was put to him, several times, that he’d claimed the speech was “not about politics” and yet, almost as he spoke, its announcements had been pushed out to journalists, and turned into graphics and pushed out to social media, where they incinerated on entry.

The problem Rishi Sunak is finding is that once everyone has started either despairing of you or just openly laughing – say because their kids’ school is shut because of falling concrete and also there’s a terror suspect sellotaped to the bottom of a lorry – it’s very hard to turn things around. And you really don’t turn things around by doing what he has done, which is to put together a long list of ridiculous things that were never going to happen and then announce that they have been scrapped.

Without wishing to pull back the wizard’s curtain too far, sometimes in my line of work, you start out with something that’s true, something that’s real, and then gradually exaggerate it for comic effect. But in this case, and truly not for the first time, you just have to transcribe reality as it is.

Meat Tax? Scrapped! Compulsory car sharing? Scrapped. Seven different bins? Scrapped!

These are all real announcements, made by the real prime minister, with a real little graphic to go with them, and when it was put to the prime minister that, actually, none of them were real, he went rootling around in his mind palace to find the place where they’d been proposed or discussed by this or that think tank or committee or policy unit, and yet here he had been, as Nick Robinson told him, “Standing up, in the building, with the authority of the prime minister, and announcing you’re scrapping things that were never seriously proposed.”

The prime minister’s other straw man of the moment is the “family in Darlington” that’s going to have to “fork out 10 or 15 thousand pounds” for a new heat pump, despite part of the prime minister’s speech actually increasing the amount that normal people might be able to claim in grants and subsidies for new heat pumps, which is already £7,500.

And the trouble is, if the prime minister’s performatively pious honesty, his telling the public that he, and only he, is going to “look them in the eye” and tell them the truth about net zero, and what it involves, then he simply doesn’t appear to have the wit to realise that what he can’t then do is tell them he’s bravely taken away the seven bins they never had to begin with.

He’ll be in Manchester next week, giving his first speech as Conservative Party leader, the third person to do so in as many years. You would be extremely brave to bet on it being anything other than his last.