There is now widespread awareness among those who voted to leave the European Union in the Brexit referendum that Messrs Farage, Johnson, Gove, Rees-Mogg have sold them a glittering package containing nothing but massive, outright lies. The image that comes to mind is that of a warship firing off a torpedo that circles around and comes back to hit the vessel smack amidships. To make matters worse, after the resignation of David Cameron (a bit like the captain who ordered the torpedo launch quickly jumping ship after the explosion), there followed a sequence of possibly the three worst, most damaging, prime ministers in Britain's history till then — Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss — each more dishonest and incompetent than the last, each more comical in his/her shifty charade, like a line-up of terrible stand-up comedians except, of course, each was presiding over an ever-worsening situation for the ordinary citizens of the country.

Having spent a lot of time in London over the last thirty-odd years, it is shocking to see how the city and the country have recently changed for the worse. I’d visited England in the mid-1980s during what one could call the Peak-Thatcher period but I really began to spend time there just after she resigned, in late November 1990. Any celebration at the departure of Ghastly Maggie was short-lived. Britain was prosperous in pockets but it was a deeply divided society, brittle and ungenerous, its government extraordinarily cruel to the have-nots, with hard-wired racism, institutional and otherwise, still very evident. All this began to shift during the Major years but there was a real transformation after Tony Blair's Labour first came to power in 1997. It wasn’t that New Labour were some kind of a Messiah Team; it was more that the naturally inclusive, fair and tolerant instincts of a society, especially those of its younger generations, no longer faced the sharp institutional obstacles put up by eighteen years of Tory rule.

Labour was in power for thirteen years, followed now by thirteen years of the next generation of Tories. During this period, there have been many ups and downs, too numerous to list here, but at some point over the last thirty years British society changed enough so that it became possible to imagine a black or brown mayor of London, home minister, chancellor or prime minister; the fact that for a period recently England, Scotland and Ireland were led by men of South Asian descent was mildly amusing, not startling.

The satisfaction one gets at imagining the arch-racists, Winston Churchill, Margaret Thatcher, and Enoch Powell, spinning furiously in their graves is dented by the fact that so many of these politicians of colour turned out to be as morally compromised in power as their nefarious white predecessors. The current British prime minister, Rishi Sunak, adds a fourth to the sequence of the three mentioned above. The columnist, Polly Toynbee, writes that he “emerges as just another in the line of shameless and reckless Tory leaders devoid of any sense of national interest, political honesty or concern for anything other than his own very short term future.” Pointing to Sunak's disastrous U-turns on climate policy, Toynbee adds that “Now they [the people] see not a leader but another sc***drel who will do and say anything disreputable, at any cost to the climate… to woo some votes...”

In the same article, there is a link to a radio interview where the journalist, Nick Robinson, asks Sunak some hard questions. The issue is that Sunak has been caught repeatedly doing what we Indians might call nautanki and jumlebaazi over climate policy: one, his fudged claim to fight the planned ban on all petrol and diesel cars from 2030 — the plan is only to ban the sale of new cars; two, the claim that he will protect all homeowners from having to pay £8,000 for insulation, when the rule only pertained to landlords renting out properties; three, that he would axe the plans to tax meat, flying and having to put rubbish in seven different bins, when no such plan actually exists.

Robinson is unrelenting in his grilling of the prime minister. “Let me ask you, where was this proposal to put a tax on meat that you had to scrap with such a fanfare?” Sunak fudges, reaching for an answer that he clearly doesn’t have. Robinson interrupts him again, pointing out that there was no such proposal. As Sunak continues, Robinson interjects again: “Where was the proposal for compulsory car-sharing that you say you’ve scrapped?” Sunak fudges again, unable to provide a reply. Robinson lets Sunak speak, just long enough to establish that there was no such proposal and then asks him about the seven rubbish bins. Sunak again cites some report which vaguely recommends a shift in garbage collection and Robinson comes in hard: “But hold on a second, Prime Minister!” Sunak tries to override but nothing doing — “No, no, no, hold on a second! You stand up, with the authority of Prime Minister, in this building, and you say you’re scrapping a series of proposals. And when I ask you about them you say [mimics him slightly], ‘oh, somebody considered it, it was in the appendix of this document!’ There’s nothing to be scrapped, which is why your former environment minister says you’re pretending to hold frightening proposals that simply do not exist!” Sunak comes in to reply after which Robinson says “... this is all about politics. You’re making a series of claims that aren't true!” The clip ends with Sunak replying that he rejects that accusation entirely and he’s actually doing things in the best interests of the country. It’s not that Robinson doesn’t allow Sunak to speak; listening to the segment, it’s clear that if Sunak had genuine answers Robinson wouldn’t have the license to cut in; given that the elected official is clearly shuffling sideways, it becomes the journalist’s duty to not let him get away with a smokescreen of empty verbiage.

Britain is currently a very grim place. Even the light at the end of the tunnel is fuzzy and dim — there is no great faith that Keir Starmer as a Labour prime minister would have the political will to undo much of the damage inflicted by austerity, Brexit, Covid, Boris Johnson and, now, the U-turn specialist, Sunak. But the one thing I do envy about the country is something that has stayed constant in the three decades of my witnessing: a columnist in a major newspaper can call a sitting prime minister by the name she feels he deserves, in this instance, ‘sc***drel’ (an unprincipled, dishonourable person), and a radio interviewer can, without the slightest hesitation, pin down this highest leader of a democracy, challenge him to substantiate his claims, and directly call him out for lying to the public for political gain.