WTF, the daughter of a Russian mother (albeit born in Romania, now Moldova, with a Ukrainian father), was brought up to like Chekhov. The Cherry Orchard features a character called Epihodov who is distinctly accident prone and nicknamed Two and Twenty Misfortunes. They’re always staging The Cherry Orchard or The Seagull  rather than WTF ‘s favourites Uncle Vanya or The Three Sisters, but the next time someone plans to stage The Cherry Orchard, and decides to make it ‘relevant’, they could do a lot worse than to set it in the 21st century UK with Rishi Sunak as Epihodov. Although to be fair, any one of his hapless cabinet colleagues could play the role. Things have been going badly wrong of late for Sunak’s government, but this last few weeks have stunk worse than the stinkiest skunk with hygiene issues. First we had Nadine Dorries resigning with immediate effect, and then hanging around like a bad smell for seven weeks befire actually going. Then we had the revelation, only days before the Nation’s kiddies were due to resume their education on Monday that many school buildings from the 1960s and 1970s were on the verge of collapse so that some angelic seven year old could be taken out at any time by collapsing concrete while reciting her 10 times table. Things got even more dire when it turned out it had been Sunak himself, when Secretary of the Treasury, who had vetoed expenditure to put all dodgy school buildings right, and then more dire than that when Scouse Secretary of State for Education,  Gillian Keegan, doing the media rounds to explain the cockup, forgot to remove her mic before suggesting that people should in fact be ‘fucking thanking her for acting when others had been sitting on their arse’. You can take the girl out of Liverpool but you cannot take Liverpool out of the girl… she actually thinks she is entitled to be thanked 

The Government was still reeling from that disaster when alleged terrorist and high security prisoner, Daniel Khalife, escaped from Wandsworth Prison while on kitchen duty, allegedly by clinging onto the underside of a bin lorry. And it is of course worth pointing out that Wandsworth is not a high security prison and has a shocking record of cockups various and that working in a kitchen where people go in and out, and where there are knives and other such lying around, may not be the most appropriate venue for someone suspected of threatening the well-being of the United Kingdom. Sunak defended these lapses by pointing out that the last Labour Government had 10 times more prison escapees, although what this has to do with the price of fish is unclear.

 What fresh horrors await this week? It hardly bears thinking about. The warm and sunny weather in these last days of summer may bring a smile to the long-suffering citizens of these Isles, but it cannot mask the fact that this Government is washed up, incompetent and as much use as tits on a fish. What a complete shower. Epihodov was known as Two and Twenty and Misfortunes. Sunak must be praying that he can keep the numbers that low.