We were warned what Rishi Sunak would be like as a Prime Minister.
In July of 2022, when Mr Sunak was in the midst of an increasingly desperate leadership battle with soon-to-be lettuce tribute act Liz Truss, he spoke to an audience of Conservative members in the quaint Kent town of Tunbridge Wells. Footage showed the then Chancellor boasting about how he had used his position to divert government funding away from "deprived urban areas" and to push it into more prosperous, Conservative-leaning areas.
The clip went viral and offered a window into the real priorities of our future Prime Minister. While he may have been part of a government promising to level up the country, this was never really on his agenda.
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Of course Mr Sunak was trounced in that leadership election by Ms Truss, who would go on to muster up a truly appalling 49-day premiership in which her government crashed the UK economy, caused a run on the pound and added huge amounts to mortgage bills across the nation.
The remarkable and rapid demise of Ms Truss reopened the door for Mr Sunak, who this time was able to rely on only the votes of Tory MPs, rather than members, to get over the line, meaning that our latest Prime Minister was elected not by the country, but by just over 200 Conservative Members of Parliament.
Undeterred by this abject lack of a mandate, Mr Sunak burst forward with bold promises to unite the country by leading a government that would act with "integrity, professionalism and accountability."
The more cynical among us took this with an immediate pinch of salt, but others were clearly taken in. There was a feeling among some commentators that after the chaos of Ms Truss and the bloviating bluster of Boris Johnson, Mr Sunak could at least, maybe offer some calm and sensible leadership.
Of course in reality, nothing could be - or has been - further from the truth.
Frustrated by the lack of any form of polling bounce, Mr Sunak has flailed around desperately in an attempt to claw back Labour's consistently robust lead amongst would-be voters. This has seen him row back on key pledges and veer into the realms of conspiracy in an attempt to appease an increasingly populist base of Tory members and backbench MPs.
This culminated in a shameful attempt to turn the climate emergency, the existential crisis of our times, into a United States-style political wedge issue. Not content with abandoning vital green commitments, Mr Sunak and his team set about inventing policies that had never existed and boasting about scrapping them.
The image of a beleaguered Mr Sunak trying to gain political capital from 'getting rid of' plans for households to be given seven recycling bins or for a new tax on meat - neither of which ever existed - neatly sum up his disingenuous time at the top.
But there was one moment that may even trump that ignominious episode when it comes to writing the epitaph for Mr Sunak's inevitably brief time in Downing Street.
On Wednesday October 4, Mr Sunak rose before the Conservative Party conference at Manchester Central conference centre. Emblazoned on the wall behind him and on the lectern in front of him were the words 'Long-Term Decisions For A Brighter Future.'
The irony of this vapid statement suddenly became clear as the Prime Minister used his keynote address to cancel the entire northern leg of the HS2 rail line plan between Birmingham and Manchester. A short-termist decision if ever there was one. That irony was only strengthened by the fact this announcement was made in Manchester, in a former train station no less.
Here was a Conservative Prime Minister, rowing back on a transformational project that his party had repeatedly promised to deliver in the very city that was set to benefit from it the most. The fact he had failed to discuss this with any local leaders despite being holed up just a few metres away for several days added plenty of insult to an already significant injury.
Mr Sunak likes to see himself as a pragmatic leader, a problem solver, but what followed his HS2 announcement proved him to be anything but. He spoke of the billions that would be saved from scrapping the northern leg of HS2 and detailed how this could be ploughed into a series of northern transport projects known as Network North.
Of course this vision fell apart more quickly than a classroom built with aerated concrete as it became clear there was no actual network to speak of within the plans and that many of the projects were not, in fact, in the north. Top work all round.
The debacle was, in many ways, the piece de resistance for a dying government, completely out of ideas or inspiration. Further killer blows were delivered a couple of weeks later in the shape of devastating by-election defeats to Labour in the formerly safe Tory strongholds of Mid Bedfordshire and Tamworth.
Those results have surely put the final nail in the coffin of 13 years of ruinous Conservative rule, while polishing off any final idea that Mr Sunak could mount a remarkable comeback in the rapidly approaching General Election.
The truth is that Rishi Sunak's Premiership will be remembered as nothing but a desperate and disappointing footnote at the end of a depressing era of British politics. When the country needed calm, he chose culture wars. When pragmatism was required, he chose populism. He will not be missed.
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