Suzanne Harrington: Happy Halloween, peasants

It's a case of trick or eat this year as Rishi Sunak takes on the Prime Minister's gig

Suzanne Harrington: "Rishi, the problem lies in your vast, bloated wealth." Picture: Andrew Hasson

What fresh Halloween hell is this? A third unelected leader in seven weeks, foisted upon us in a country that likes to lecture other countries about parliamentary democracy?

Someone worth £730m, who will soon be telling the rest of us — single parents, nurses, teachers, minimum wagers — to tighten our belts? What is this — trick or cheat?

Rishi, mate, if our belts get any tighter they’ll snap us in half.

As one of the lucky ones, who still more or less has a belt, I’m still one of the squeezed middle, muddling along to a constant background hum of anxiety: How much month at the end of the money?

There are millions whose belts have already frayed and snapped, or who never had a belt in the first place, whose anxiety is full-blown fear.

Foodbanks and despair in the world’s fifth-biggest economy. Trick or eat.

But hey, Rishi. At least being personally richer than 14 African countries — I could list them but it’d take too long — should make you harder to bribe, right? Less likely to cash in on the freebies.

And unlike the wet lettuce you’ve succeeded — I use the term loosely (succeed I mean, not wet lettuce) — you do actually have a brain. Unfortunately, it’s a free-market hedge fund Tory Brexit brain, but dare we hope you are not a monster?

You paid for us all to go out for dinner between lockdowns; should we still associate you with cheap pizza and cut-price sushi? Or just cuts?

At this stage, we’re so worn out from the impact of 12 years of your party — austerity, Brexit, Boris bloody Johnson — that we dare to hope, in the absence of a general election, that you may be the least bad. You’re not openly racist, for a start.

You appear to have more intelligence than your predecessor and more integrity than your second-last predecessor; that bar, however, is so low you could hold the World Limbo Championships underneath it.

Rishi, the problem lies in your vast, bloated wealth. As with most of your cabinet colleagues, you have not, and never have had, the
faintest clue of what ordinary feels like. Yet your new job pays £164,000 — a fortune to us, petty cash to you — which suggests that you’re not in it for the money. Is it a hobby?

Because if you need a hobby that’s also a challenge, there’s always triathlons. Or fixing the climate crisis. Or world peace.

Meanwhile, minister for the 18th century Jacob Rees Mogg, worth a piffling £100m, has resigned from the government and gone back to his day job of haunting the wardrobes of stately homes.

Who will replace him? Suella Braverman? She’s the one with a Martin Luther King dream of sending asylum seekers to Rwanda, at a cost of £600,000 per head.

We can only hope that the maths makes as little sense to you as it does to us, before you ever factor in the cruelty. Happy Halloween, peasants.