Matthew Parris

I’ve been conducting a straw poll. Using incidental encounters with people who don’t follow politics closely, I’m learning what ordinary voters do or don’t know or think of Rishi Sunak. Responses range between neutral and mildly positive. Beyond that, what do I get from respondents? (1) They really don’t know much about him; but (2) they do know he’s rich. The problem for Mr Sunak is not so much that he’s known to be rich – of course he is – but that this is almost the only thing about him that has sunk in. Here in Britain the observation that a politician is rich is typically followed by the thought that this may ‘separate’ them from the lives and concerns of the ordinary voter. ‘If you haven’t lived it,’ we say, ‘how can you fully understand it?

Let nobody say Liz Truss achieved nothing in her mayfly days at Downing Street. She gave away the vast British Indian Ocean territory, the islands and the sea around them, known as the Chagos Islands. To be more precise, in talks with Mauritian officials while in New York, she set in train negotiations with Mauritius over a handover next year. Exempted from any such agreement will be the island of Diego Garcia, nominally British but for all practical purposes under the control of the United States, who maintain a huge and important military base there, probably torturing people – but we wouldn’t know or, if we do, wouldn’t be so impertinent as to complain.

Theresa May’s premiership is now a memory. Boris Johnson’s time in office assumes the status of a rather brief, if often embarrassing, interlude. Liz Truss has gone in short order. The threat of a comeback by Johnson has been lifted. What a rollercoaster. Each of these events, in its time, took centre-stage in our politics and each prime minister became for a while the object of contempt, suspicion and rage. I called Mrs May the death star of British politics; I called Mr Johnson a moral toad; I called Liz Truss a planet-sized mass of over-confidence and ambition teetering on a pinhead of a political brain.

‘That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency,’ wrote George Eliot in Middlemarch, ‘has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind; and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it.’ Her thought extends beyond ‘compassion fatigue’ in the face of global suffering on a scale beyond our homely ken, but to life itself in its unfathomable abundance: the dramas, the joys and the sorrows and the sheer activity that surrounds us and would engulf us if we paused for long enough to think about everything. We screen almost all of it out. We have to. Our Derbyshire home is on a hillside in the middle of fields and woods.

When something starts to be said with such frequency that it fast becomes the conventional wisdom, one should pause, step back and give it a second thought. In almost every ‘Advice to King Charles’ column I’ve read, and in broadcast commentary too, the same piece of wisdom is being repeated: the new King must now distance himself from his own strong opinions on a range of subjects, and assume an air of neutrality on anything remotely controversial or ‘political’. He must forget, and we must forget, that he once had beliefs. ‘You can do it, Charles,’ we’ve been saying.

It glows. The whole painting glows. Glows not just with the way the light from a fire unseen beyond the artist’s frame reflects in his glistening eyes; reflects in the moist redness of his almost girlish lips; reflects in the folds of his turban and silky grey sash. It glows too from an inner radiation, glows from his character. We have in Britain some arcane tax legislation that can bring a harvest that’s anything but arcane. The recent acquisition of Joseph Wright of Derby’s ‘Self-Portrait at the Age of about Forty’ (c. 1772) has been made possible ‘in lieu of inheritance tax… under a hybrid arrangement and allocated to Derby Museums… with further support from the National Heritage Memorial Fund’.