Where we differ is that I see this as unacceptable human behaviour, and you are saying it is understandable actions of human beings.

We don’t differ here, actually. A lot of human behaviour is understandable but still unacceptable. Like, again, most crimes. One can understand the human impulse behind the crime without thinking it’s acceptable behaviour. I simply draw a distinction between being angry/annoyed/whatever because of the action, while not devoting energy to hating the person.

And yeah, a lot of politics is acting. Doesn’t mean that it’s not possible to see what’s underneath that. That’s the human element I see. Not humanity in, say, Braverman’s vicious, spiteful rhetoric, but the massive lack of self-esteem underneath. Not humanity in Johnson’s egregious lies, but in the emotionally damaged toddler underneath. I don’t think it excuses or justifies the behaviour, I just think it explains it. All the lies, corruption, fraud, financial gain, etc… not acceptable, they should all lose their jobs (and arrested if it rises to the level of criminality). But they’re still just behaving in ways that we know humans behave when they’re in a position to get away with it, because we haven’t developed a sufficiently rigorous means of making sure they can’t get away with it. Where everyone in this thread seems to be wilfully misunderstanding me is assuming that because I understand why they’re doing it, it means I think it’s okay and that they shouldn’t be held to account. Knowing why someone did something unacceptable doesn’t mean it’s okay that they did it or that they shouldn’t face consequences for their actions, whatever those consequences may be. It’s just about not engaging with a tribalistic “I’m good, they’re evil” mentality. Hatred and black and white thinking is corrosive of democracy and of society as a whole, regardless of who is doing it, and it’s impossible to hate someone when you’ve taken the time to consider what normal human impulses are driving them. You can still judge the action, while refusing to fall into the trap of perceiving them as less human or more malicious than you are.

Sunak is weak. He’s an intelligent enough guy, but he’s not assertive enough to actually control his party, and that’s what’s necessary to make it succeed. He wants it to succeed, he just doesn’t have the strength to make it happen, ultimately because so many of the MP’s are fucked up emotionally stunted children who are too unruly for someone as weak as Sunak to wrangle. He’s also got a lot of that traditional conservative “if you want to succeed, you should put in the work yourself” mentality, because that’s how life has always seemed to go for him - ignoring, of course, that he had a lot of luck in his favour, and advantages that others never had access to. A lot of people who’ve had fairly easy lives think their success is because they worked really hard, when the reality is they’ve often had to work less hard than others. Sunak is intelligent, but because he’s sailed through life on easy mode, he’s actually pretty lazy and isn’t able to work hard to get through a real challenge.

A description I saw of him a month or two ago (from a left-leaning publication) really resonated with me: he is actually working as hard as he can, and he really resents the fact that right now, it’s not getting him what he feels he deserves, and he’s annoyed with the fact that the electorate aren’t sufficiently grateful. That would be because he’s trying to give the country what he thinks it needs, rather than what it actually needs, with the result being that the electorate have nothing to be grateful for. Sunak’s biggest weakness is in believing that everybody should be just like him. He can’t control his party because most of them aren’t like him, and he can’t relate to the electorate because most of them aren’t like him either. Doesn’t mean he’s evil, just kind of spoiled and insulated from the realities of life for most people.

Definitely agree Sunak will jump on a plane and head back to the US when he loses the election, though. Not because he’s fleeing the scene of the crime, so to speak, but purely because it’ll be a “they don’t understand my brilliance, so they don’t deserve to have me” tantrum. He’ll want to go somewhere where he feels people “get” how “brilliant” he is.