RISH! Sunak and his exclamation mark spent his first speech as Prime Minister wittering on about integrity, and then he goes and appoints a cabinet which was very blatantly about trying to appease the various warring factions of what is still being described as a political party and not what it really is, a collection of amoral and unprincipled hacks who care for nothing but their own self-interests.

It's a Boris Johnson Cabinet without the Prime Liar, just the ministerial liars instead. This new cabinet is basically Boris Johnson's greatest hits - only I think I misspelled that last word.

At midday Sunak promised to restore “integrity, professionalism and accountability' to government, before the afternoon was out he had put Suella Braverman back as Home Secretary in charge of government sponsored institutional cruelty, despite the fact that just last week she had been forced to resign for committing a gross breach of the ministerial code by being cavalier with sensitive government documents, not a whole lot of integrity, professionalism or accountability there. 

Her appointment is just cynical political maneuvering which tells us that Sunak knows his position is weak. Recently Braverman told us her “dream” was to see a plane full of desperate asylum seekers taking off on a one-way trip to a dictatorship in Central Africa. There's a word for people who take pleasure from the suffering and misery of others, and such people should never be allowed near a position of power.

Any relief about seeing the back of Jacob Rees-Mogg was quickly neutralised by finding out that not just is Suella Braverman back at the Home Office, but Dominic Raab, Gavin Williamson, and Michael Gove are also back in the Cabinet. It's like we have collectively endured an expensive and emotionally draining home renovation only to find that the mould and the nasty smell are back. Sunak can't stop the rot in this government, he is part of the rot.

It took Liz Truss a couple of weeks to destroy the benefit of the doubt granted to any new Prime Minister, Sunak managed it in six hours. Even Conservative commentator Tim Montgomerie, founder of Conservative Home, tweeted: "A PM committed to integrity does not appoint Gavin Williamson to govt."

Sunak's strategy for government is to reward the other careerist morons who helped him get the top job in a government that doesn't deserve power and to hand out posts to others in the hope that they won't spend the next six months plotting to bring him down. This is a cabinet of none of the talents. At this rate he will be appointing Boris Johnson as his ethics advisor. Sunak is trying to unite his hopelessly riven party, like trying to repair a smashed eggshell with string and bribery, when what he should be doing is trying to unite the public.  

But we should all have known that Sunak was going to be dire, and not just because he spent such a long time enabling Boris Johnson. It was always clear that his judgement was hopeless because this is a man who allegedly spends £3000 on a suit but still can't get a pair of trousers that fits.  

You must be a bit of an insecure sap if you believe a suit salesman who assures you that if your trousers end three inches above your ankles it makes you look taller. It just goes to prove that £730 million cannot buy you the ability to dress yourself properly, nor indeed to buy a functioning moral compass. But as my mammy was always wont to say, you don't get to be rich by being a nice person.

Meanwhile, spare a thought for puir wee Andrew Bowie, who today is staring disconsolately at his six chips, all that toadying was to no avail, Sunak has overlooked Bowie's, ahem, “talents” and given the job of Scottish colonial governor back to Johnson loyalist Alister Jack. It is a sign of the utter lack of ability amongst the six Scottish Tory MPs that the serial no-mark Union Jack has kept his job under three Prime Ministers. The Scottish Conservative MPs are not so much a talent pool as the stain left behind when a damp patch dries out.

At his first outing at PMQs, Sunak showed that he had studied the Johnson play book well. We got bluster and a complete avoidance of any attempt to answer the question with deflection and weak, cheap political insults. There was a bizarre moment when Sunak declared that Britain was a mess and the Tory benches cheered. Have they forgotten who has been in power for the past twelve years.

Sunak completely ignored Ian Blackford’s questions about the reinstatement of the disgraced Suella Braverman and cuts to benefits, and instead replied with a word salad of thin-skinned peevishness about Blackford’s impertinence. So no change there then.
The Labour leader Keir Starmer got in one good line: "The only time he ran a competitive election he got trounced by the former PM who herself was beaten by a lettuce." However given the repeated failure of PMQs as a mechanism for holding power to account, that's all we have got left now, government by quip.

On a personal note, as a stroke survivor who has been left with significant disabilities, it was good to see so many MPs wearing Stroke Association badges in the House of Commons today to mark the upcoming World Stroke Day on 29 October. There are 1.3 million stroke survivors in the UK, every five minutes someone in the UK suffers a stroke, and there are 100,000 strokes in the UK every year. 

It's easy for a politician to wear a badge but what is really needed is greater investment in stroke treatment so that more people can rebuild their lives after a stroke.

This piece is an extract from today’s REAL Scottish Politics newsletter, which is emailed out at 7pm every weekday with a round-up of the day's top stories and exclusive analysis from the Wee Ginger Dug.

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