Another busy week for Britain’s Ministry of Metaphor, as the country’s largest supplier of that luxury product “water” teeters on the brink of collapse. Thames Water has become the latest object lesson in the predictable and predicted folly of privatised monopolies, aided by a regulator that’s an even bigger wet wipe than the fatbergs bunging up the sewers. If you thought leveraged debt was bad when the Glazers did it with Manchester United, it’s possible you’ll find it even worse when water firms are holding you to a 40% bill hike if you simply want one of the essential building blocks of human life to come out of your tap. The companies have acted like cowboy builders who fleece unsuspecting customers for catastrophically poor work, and now want you to pay them huge sums again to fix it.
Back to them in a minute. For now, let’s rewind to early January this year, when the prime minister portentously unveiled his government’s five pledges. You may recall quite a lot of political experts explaining loftily that he had chosen these specific targets as they were actually not all that hard to achieve. As Rishi Sunak put it then: “Those are the people’s priorities. We will either have achieved them or not. No tricks, no ambiguity. We’re either delivering for you or we’re not.”
Can I shock you? They’re not. Inflation is up, recession is on the cards (the actual cards, not the pledge card), the Rwanda scheme to stop the small boats has just been ruled unlawful, UK debt-to-GDP ratio has topped 100% for the first time since 1961, and NHS waiting lists are up from biblical to apocalyptic. Amazing, given the gravity of those, that noises-off to the main event continue to be bleatings by the likes of Jacob Rees-Mogg and Nadine Dorries – the sort of pair you’d expect to turn a corner and find if you were riding your tricycle round the Overlook Hotel – who have now put five times more effort into greasing up to Boris Johnson than they ever did into public service.
Today, the government had hoped to dominate the agenda with its new “once in a generation” plan to restore the NHS, at least the seventh such plan in a decade, never mind a generation; but who’s counting? However, as I was typing this, Zac Goldsmith resigned as a minister, declaring himself “horrified” that it was impossible to get anything done on the environment any more as Sunak personally was “simply uninterested”, pointing out that the prime minister had chosen to attend Rupert Murdoch’s summer party as opposed to the Paris climate summit.
As for Sunak’s ability to withstand these diurnal derailments, the signs don’t look encouraging. He increasingly resembles not so much a prime minister as a collection of blandishments that fall on the wrong side of the fine line between platitude and twatitude. Sunday saw him address those unable to make mortgage payments with the bizarre advice: “Hold your nerve.” Oh dear.
Perhaps, like King Cnut, Sunak was actually making a philosophical point about the limitations of rulers that would be mockingly misunderstood by lesser intellects for the rest of time. The alternative reading is that Sunak, who for a while back there was the Conservative party’s idea of a cool person, is merely an out-of-touch plonker. It was perhaps not beyond the realms of prediction that the guy who spent Covid press conferences chirping “thanks PM!” to Boris Johnson would simply graduate to addressing various looming collapses of the public realm with catchphrases such as “I’m on it!”
But is he, in fact, on it? On the repulsive Rwanda scheme, the government has now spent £120m and counting on a policy that was always doomed. Maybe Rishi’s best hope is explaining that it’s a pisser, but one that’s basically covered by having one person dragged reluctantly into the income tax system. His wife.
For now, it’s hard to conclude that Sunak will succeed in rebooting a government that’s been reset more times than most people’s Gmail passwords. Maybe that’s the problem: too many passcode attempts have left ministers locked out of government. Perhaps somewhere on one of the UK’s otherwise boarded-up high streets is an unofficial shop that unlocks governments, no questions asked. If you know of one, please send its coordinates to Downing Street. Until then, the Sunak administration remains a study in ineffectuality on multiple fronts, leading Goldsmith to cite, not unreasonably, “a kind of paralysis”.
In some ways, the water crisis feels most emblematic of all these systemic failings and their knock-on costs to ordinary people who simply cannot afford them. Perhaps the most ludicrous pose of the entire water company shambles is that adopted by the people in charge of the country. The government is acting like people this is happening to, as opposed to because of. Yet ignorance of this long-brewing disaster cannot be claimed. In fact, the potential for the precise whirlwind now being reaped was recognised and outlined by the then environment secretary, Michael Gove, in a trenchant address to the water industry back in 2018. It’s all there – concern over excessive profits, excessive salaries, offshore financial arrangements, prioritisation of dividend payments, and warnings about highly leveraged firms, specifically Thames Water.
Yet what was done? Apparently, nothing. Unfortunately, this was during the long, long period in Britain’s national story when its government was not really able to even have any other policies than getting a Brexit deal done, much less to act on them. It was a time of both political tumult and total stasis, as all the things a government really ought to have been getting on with were shelved in the cause of frantically shaking the Conservative party in the hope some kind of deal would drop out. Addressing the dangerously mounting issues with the water industry was just one of the casualties.
Pandemic preparation was another, with the Covid inquiry this week hearing more about how massive administrative resources were diverted to planning for a no-deal Brexit, a stopping of work streams that hampered many other civil contingency plans. Still, what’s the worst that can happen? A question we no longer ask after March 2020. Back in 2018, the body representing the water industry was snorting at Gove’s aspersions, declaring hotly that it looked forward to its pet regulator “bringing some sorely needed facts and balance to the debate”.
Well, that particular tide has now come in, and it is both metaphorically and literally full of shit. The pandemic preparation timebomb detonated to devastating effect; a number of other timebombs are on the shortest of fuses. The government has now reached a state of perfect vicious cycle, when the only thing worse than the things it does are all the things it didn’t get round to doing.
Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist