Mr and Mrs Sunak of Downing Street have given a joint interview to Grazia magazine in which they give answers to the most pressing questions facing the country. They don’t bother sweating the small stuff like the state of the economy, the upcoming Budget, or the election prospects of the beleaguered Tories, but instead share their carefully considered thoughts on dividing up the household chores.

Akshata Murty gushes that Rishi’s ‘special skill’ is tidying the bedroom. Rishi is not to be outdone when it comes to spilling the secrets of their home life. He confesses to breaking away from his day job (just the small matter of running the country, lest we forget) to go upstairs to the Downing Street flat and make the bed because of his wife’s habit of leaving it in a mess. Indeed (and make of this what you will) the most urgent question on Sunak’s mind most days appears to be whether his wife has made the bed properly. ‘You also just don’t like making the bed. I mean it bugs me. So I actually sometimes come up back into the flat from the office after we’ve all left to make the bed. I’ll be irritated if it’s not been made’, he said. Akshata, duly reprimanded, confessed to not being a ‘morning person’, confiding that making sure the bedroom was ‘neat and tidy’ was one of her husband’s specialties.

Is it any wonder the country is in such a mess if this is where Sunak’s core skills really lie? Perhaps when he is kicked out of Downing Street at the next election (and barring a miracle this is the most likely outcome if the polls are to be believed) he should consider becoming a chambermaid at the local Premier Inn?

There is much more of this vacuous nonsense. We learn that Rishi takes the lead when it comes to loading the couple’s dishwasher, with Murty conceding: ‘I’m not the most organised person compared to Rishi’. As for cooking for their two daughters, Murty coos that her husband has ‘more talent in that department’. Apparently Rishi also has to remind his wife that the children need carbohydrate and protein at mealtimes. Oh please. Enough. The takeout from this interview, if there is one, is meant to be that these two super-privileged multimillionaires are just ordinary homebodies like everyone else in Britain, struggling to make ends meet, reduced to squabbling over boring domestic chores, and making sure the kids eat their greens.

Not all publicity is good publicity

The ostensible reason for the joint interview with the ‘country’s most high-profile couple’ about how they share out domestic chores is to mark International Women’s Day. But why agree to it? Why would Sunak and his advisers think that droning on about his home life, making him out to be a cross between a househusband and superman, would play well with voters? It reeks of political desperation. Nor is it politically wise to follow in the path of Theresa May (another doomed PM) when it comes to daft publicity stunts. Who can forget the toe-curling interview May and her husband Philip did on the BBC’s The One Show, where he revealed that the couple split household duties into ‘girls’ jobs’ and ‘boys’ jobs’. His assigned role was to take out the household bins. The best that can be said is that at least with the Mays it was half-believable, in that they bore a passing resemblance to an ordinary suburban couple. In the case of Sunak and Murty, it is too absurd. It is to treat the average voter as a gullible idiot.

Sunak has form when it comes to daft PR stunts that spectacularly backfire. After all, he is the man who didn’t know how to use a bank card to pay for filling up his car at a petrol station (a borrowed car rather than his own at that). These are supposedly serious times in which the country faces multiple crises. Sunak is trailing by huge margins in the polls. His tenure in Downing Street has lasted barely 18 months but it already feels like an age. His problem is that he is not a natural performer in an age dominated by performative politics. He can come across, at times, as a little robotic, and interviews like this are meant to help humanise him. But not all publicity is good publicity and this poorly-judged PR stunt is proof of exactly that. It merely encourages mockery and disbelief.