Rishi Sunak gets stuck into his new job - unlike his predecessors

Former prime minister Rishi Sunak started his new job yesterday – writing a weekly column on “business, technology, politics and the economy” for the Sunday Times.

He won’t be the only recent former Tory PM with a newspaper column of course – his former boss Boris Johnson continues to churn out his mundane “will this do?” musings for the Daily Mail for a reputed seven-figure annual fee. But at least we will know exactly how much Sunak is getting for his thoughts – as he remains an MP, he will have to declare his earnings to the public Commons Register of Members’ Interests.

And still, it only took five days from announcing his new job for Sunak’s first column to appear – unique among former Tory residents of Downing Street. October 27 marks exactly two years since said Boris Johnson announced he was joining GB News as a “presenter, programme maker and commentator” playing “a key role” in coverage of the 2024 UK and US elections, elections which keen followers of current affairs may have noted have long since passed.

“I’m going to be giving this remarkable new TV channel my unvarnished views on everything from Russia, China, the war in Ukraine, how we meet all those challenges,” said Johnson in a video back in October 2023. Yet two years on Johnson has characteristically failed to clock in for his first shift!.

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Johnson’s immediate successor as PM, meanwhile, appears to have stalled with her much-vaunted next move. Back in February, Liz Truss announced the launch of an “uncensorable” social media platform this summer to take on the “deep state”. The as-yet-unnamed platform would be “uncancellable” in the hope of reversing what she described as “the West’s war against itself”.

It is now almost November – very much not summer – and not only has Truss’s new network not appeared yet, she doesn’t seem to have mentioned it since. Rats in a Sack did contact Truss’s “people”, as they say, for an update, but hasn’t heard back.

Finally, how goes Baron Cameron of Chipping Norton, the former Tory PM ennobled, brought back into frontline politics by Sunak, then unceremoniously dragged back from a trip to Albania as his successor was calling a general election in the driving rain?

Since that disastrous election, Cameron has managed to speak a whopping three times in the House of Lords and submitted a grand total of no written questions to ministers. He has, however, been pictured attending the Cheltenham horse racing festival, SXSW music festival, Wimbledon and Cornbury House Horse Trials, so at least he’s not “bored shitless” – the reason friends gave for him accepting the foreign secretary role in the first place.