Prime Minister Rishi Sunak was today revealed to be an immersive comedy character along the lines of Alan Partridge or Borat.
'I started by getting him elected as a Conservative MP,' said comedian Sanjay Banerjee, who plays Sunak. 'Which frankly wasn’t that hard, given his constituency would elect a lamppost if it had a blue rosette on it. And then I thought I’d just see how far I could take it.
'No one was more surprised than me when he was made Chancellor and then leader of the party, and thus Prime Minister without reference to the electorate. I keep waiting for the bubble to burst - every day I wake up in 10 Downing Street thinking this’ll be the day, I’ll open the papers and see I’ve been found out. But it never happens.
'The idea - do I really need to explain this? - was to satirise a posh, out of touch politician with no idea about ordinary people’s lives, who puts his foot in it whenever he tries to relate to them. Frankly I thought I’d gone too far with things like the petrol station stunt, where he borrowed a staffer’s small hatchback for a photo op, as if people wouldn’t realise it’s not the car he usually drives. But people seemed to accept he was just a bit clumsy around PR stuff.
'So I had to up the ante - asking the Welsh if they were looking forward to the football, saying I was deprived as a kid because we didn’t have Sky TV, and of course leaving D-Day early. I mean come on, what real British politician would do that? But still nothing.
'Frankly, it’s why I called an early election - I can’t live like this any more. It frightens me that no matter how far I take it, no one realises it’s all a gag. Then again, if a multi-millionaire like David Cameron can say 'We’re all in the same boat’, I suppose all bets are off. You’d almost think he was a comedy character too.'
'Yeah, OK,' said comedian Steve Barnes, who played Cameron for years. 'I suppose it’s time to come clean.
'Frankly, I’d been looking forward to retiring the Cameron character - I do quite a few other characters too, you know, plus improv on Thursday and Sunday nights. But then they bloody made him Foreign Secretary.'
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