There’s a perfect storm heading Sunak’s way - just don't expect him to turn up to notice it
On Tuesday morning, it’d be curious to know what exactly was going through Rishi Sunak’s head when he woke up having skipped perhaps one of the most important and symbolic Parliamentary votes of his premiership up to that point.
It was a vote on whether or not to accept the Privileges Committee recommendations that former Prime Minister Boris Johnson should lose his parliamentary pass.
It does nothing substantive, this ‘punishment’ - at least not really; Johnson merely cannot access the Parliamentary estate any more. Johnson ran away from more direct punitive sanctions.
It was, however, the symbolism of the vote; it might have been a sign that 118 MPs from within the Conservatives were trying to move on from their experience of Post Johnson Syndrome. For them, it was an exorcism.
A lot of them could see the writing on the wall, too - the matter still provides cut-through; ‘Partygate’ comes up as a frequent topic in focus groups to this day, as does the behaviour of Boris Johnson, his legacy and how it toxifies the Conservative Party brand as a whole.
Voters were watching as well. To have voted against was just as much a statement as not voting at all; non-attendance or abstention, in the face of some of the most serious charges a politician can face by way of contempt or deliberately misleading Parliament (and by extension the British people and democracy) is taking a position.
Yet despite those optics - and despite the continued intrigue from the voting public - Rishi Sunak decided not to honour the Committee’s recommendations - he probably expected the issue to go through quietly ‘on the nod.’
It didn’t, and Rishi Sunak - and around 200 MPs - was made to look utterly ridiculous in the process.