If you have paid any attention to the news of late, you may have heard of a man called Rishi Sunak.
Today he is making a speech about apprenticeships. You may see a clip of him speaking at some point. And from it, you will learn absolutely nothing about who this man is, why he does things, and what he's for.
If anyone of us did or said the same, and posted it on social media, it would be met with precisely the same response as Sunak's little piece-to-camera: a shrug, a headscratch, before someone moves on to a video of a labrador having a swim, or a new way of arranging spoons.
It may surprise you to learn, in a multimedia, TikTok-driven age, that this person is the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, and he is so rubbish at it that he doesn't even have a meme yet.
"We like the colour blue. Will that do?" (Simon Walker / No 10 Downing Street)Liz Truss had multiple memes: she said lots stupid things. Boris Johnson had a bulldozer, and a hair-ruffle, and rugby-tackling a small boy. Even Theresa May, the dullest Prime Minister since John Major, still jiggles her elbows to Dancing Queen across our Instagram feeds now and again.
But Rishi alone is missing from the meme-fest, despite being the youngest, richest and prettiest of them all. It's not because he hasn't tried. It's because there's nothing there. No hook to hang your hat on, no clear characteristic beyond having paid the same attention to his hair parting as Adrian Mole.
Despite having been crowned as Prime Minister, serving us for years as Chancellor, and being richer than Croesus, we know next to nothing about him. He's an empty vessel, emptier even than David Cameron who was an echoing void of principle and purpose, idly playing at being PM because well, why not.
The reason why the Conservative Party is still madly thrashing around looking for a leader is because, with Rishi in charge, they don't have one.
'Hmm, yes, and what does this role involve, again?' (PA)This is the country's first brown Prime Minister, the first Hindu to ever hold such high office, a man so determined to stamp out hate he thrust himself onto our screens one Friday evening to decry the state of the nation, call out extremism, and demand we all do our bit. Then faced with a racist who'd paid him £10m he decided it was neither racist nor extreme, until one of his ministers said it was. When the PM is being led by the Business Secretary or a chequebook, there's no leadership.
This is a man who anchored his government's success or failure to the economy, and then strangled it with cuts to services which dragged us into recession. He said migrants are such a drain on the finances we can't have any more, and they should all go to Rwanda because that would be cheaper, before ordering up more migrants than have ever been recorded and offering £3,000 a time to get on a plane to Kigali. When Paul Kagame seems to have a better grasp of the morality of the situation, our leader is officially redundant.
When Ofcom decides that Jacob Rees-Mogg, Esther McVey and Philip Davies are too thick and unlikeable to be in people's living rooms without doing something unwelcome, but that it would be too cruel to censure them, like telling a four-year-old their painting of a house was crap, any sane Prime Minister would steer clear of such social embarrassments. Not Rishi. He made Esther 'minister for common sense', and Lord how I wish he was being satirical.
If a PM is being outwitted by chickens, the country has a problem (AFP via Getty Images)As the polls collapse and he throws worse cuts after bad in an effort to give the electorate a bribe it doesn't want, some say that Sunak has hidden himself away, playing with toy soldiers as the electoral cycle grinds slowly beneath his feet.
But to liken Sunak to Hitler in his bunker is to do our Prime Minister a disservice. There's now way he can be compared to a mass murdering dictator, hopped up on amphetamine, opiates, cocaine and animal hormones, attacked by Parkinson's disease, and crippled by failure before he shot his own dog and bit down on a cyanide capsule.
Because, 80 years later, people still joke that at least Hitler kept the trains running on time. And there's no-one who'll say that about Sunak. Any sensible person in his position - on to a loser, surrounded by traitors, able only to pick the moment of their own demise - would at this point reach for a legacy. Something which, in the years to come, would bring him the sort of comfort that Liz Truss is as yet denied, the sense that in one thing, at least, he was right.
Rwanda? Nope. Dentists? Nah. Ooh, rebuilding schools afflicted by crumbling concrete? Nuh-uh. A useless Prime Minister should still be cynical enough to clutch at the straw of meeting nuclear veterans to discuss their missing medical records, and take credit for ending the nuked blood scandal while leaving the next government with the bill. But no, not even that.
Maybe he could make a useful bike rack. Perhaps he could function as a book end, or a spectacles-holder, or one of those cable-organisers that keep all the computer wires tidy and you never have to look at or think about again.
Sunak has the spine of a jellybaby and the moral awareness of Boris Johnson on a wine-and-cheese rampage. He's got the political nous of Jeremy Corbyn, the survival instincts of a lemming in despair, and the interpersonal skills of a duck who's just had a beakful of whatever was in Hitler's syringe. Anyone with the savvy to climb to the top, in a functioning political party, would have the wits and skills to find at least one policy that worked, do one public appearance that mattered, show one bit of backbone.
But Sunak didn't climb; he floated. The Tories aren't functioning; they're what's left after Mogg ran away. And the one thing the PM does, now, is control the rest of the machine, stop ministers coming up with policies, deny funds for improvements, restrict the budgets and insist, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that he's got a plan, and it's working, and although it's invisible it's VERY expensive and all the people's taxes will be needed to pay for it.
His own party, his own voters, the newspapers he can normally rely on aren't buying it. Only Rishi's left, poring over a Treasury spreadsheet in a office he schemed to get into, without a single clue as to what do when he got there. If only he had a meme: then perhaps at least we wouldn't pity him.
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