Does Sunak hope his ‘war footing’ will be his Falklands?

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Those people who know me will realise that I am not one for conspiracy theories. When rational thinking gives way to the irrational, we are on a slippery slope. As the writer GK Chesterton said, and he was a Christian thinker, when people cease to believe in God, they don’t believe in nothing. They will believe in anything.

I would adapt that for a more secular world. When people cease to believe the evidence of their own eyes, they will believe in anything.

What’s the threat? War or election?

So no conspiracy theories here. Yet I wrote here a couple of days ago of the outside possibility that Rishi Sunak might use some terrible geopolitical development, in Ukraine or elsewhere, as an excuse to fend off the looming election catastrophe his party is facing.

We now learn that the UK, or at least its defence industry, has been put on a “war footing”. Sunak insists we are not on the brink of war, for which whichever god you believe in be praised. Yet that phrase “war footing” appears in a number of news outlets and is sourced to Sunak directly. He thinks there is at least the outside chance of a war, and we must be prepared for it.

The evidence for this is slender. We are not physically involved in Ukraine, or the Middle East. Jeremy Corbyn had a typically wrong-headed piece in The Guardian the other day, claiming we had been “launching military strikes against Yemen, one of the poorest countries in the world”.

No, we launched strikes against the Houthis, a radical Islamist sect that had conquered the Yemen by force, was illegally occupying large chunks of it, and was attacking ships crewed by innocent people, who risked losing their lives. You might as well criticise us for attacking the Germans in France in 1939. Always on the wrong side of history, Jeremy.

But from the Sunak camp there comes the stench of desperation, and of desperate self-pity. His client press say he is despondent, and cannot understand why he is so far behind in the opinion polls.

Born to succeed…?

Look at his career. Head Boy at Winchester. Oxford, then an MBA at Stanford University in California. Goldman Sachs, earning a fortune by most people’s standards, then more money from hedge funds. Married an even bigger fortune along the way.

He became Chancellor of the Exchequer before he was even 40, then the first Asian Prime Minister. This man has never known failure.

And now he is staring down the barrel at utter catastrophe. Not to be remembered as the first Asian Prime Minister but the one who delivered to his party the worst electoral defeat in a lifetime. He can disappear to California and spend the rest of his life in a hot tub with his fellow tech bros, earning even more money he doesn’t need.

But his legacy will be as an utter failure, the third in a trio of utter failures. One was pushed out in utter disgrace. The next crashed the economy. Now it is Sunak’s turn.

Desperate men do desperate things. And Sunak is desperate.

Just saying. “War footing”?