Rishi Sunak meekly sat, waiting his turn, as if he was a little boy nervously perched outside the principal’s office, while in the foreground Britain’s most tattooed woman chatted away about getting her genitals inked.
This being ITV’s This Morning—the long-running, extremely scandal-hit daytime TV magazine show where a recipe slot can be followed by an in-depth interview with a stalking victim—the British Prime Minister, the day before the U.K. General Election that will determine his and the ruling Conservative Party’s fate, was out to desperately scrounge a few final votes.
The polling forecast going into Thursday is for a possible landslide for the opposition Labour party—the prospect of which has motivated Sunak and his ministers to invoke likely doom for the entire country, despite many voters seeing the corruption and sleaze-beset Tories as responsible for a long slide into the very same.
Before Sunak could do his hard, last-minute sell, the presenters wanted to talk to “the most tattooed mum in the U.K.,” Becky Holt, and as the cameras caught her chatting away to presenters Ben Shephard and Cat Deeley, with Sunak, they also caught the country’s leader looking forlornly on in the background.
The pair met and greeted each other after the show, also captured by the cameras—which must have been a surreal turn of events for both of them; but perhaps not as surreal as for Sunak, relegated to the back of the studio, listening to all the detail of Holt’s life in ink.
“I had my first tattoo when I was 15 years old,” Holt told the hosts. “It wasn’t a wise decision, I had my boyfriend’s name tattooed directly across my crotch. Obviously that doesn’t exist anymore, but that is when the obsession really started.”
She has spent around £30,000 ($38,000) on getting around 95% of her body inked. As the interview showed, the refreshingly direct Holt could teach politicians a thing or two about clear communication. She said she was “living for the moment,” and not thinking ahead to being older with tattoos. At least she’d have an “interesting story” to tell the staff at the nursing home she may end up in, she added.
Of getting her genitals tattooed, Holt said, “It took three sessions, the first one is an hour and a half which was just the line work and then a few weeks later I had it colored… It was horrific, it’s like ripping, burning, not nice at all… It was just swollen, you have to be careful, it was a little bit stingy. But it actually healed really quickly. I guess the skin there is a little bit different, so it did heal a lot quicker.”
Maybe considering what he had heard as a metaphor for how he might recover after receiving a thorough drubbing at the ballot box, Sunak, when asked casually in the following segment how he was feeling, managed a slightly stunned, “I’m very well. That was incredible… that was quite something.”
Shephard said it was “the nature of This Morning: we go from the most tattooed mum in the U.K. to the Prime Minister.”
Sunak, trying to look relaxed and Mr. Normal—a pointless drag act given everyone knows his wealth and political ambitions—laughed his attempt at a man-of-the-people giggle, and said, “Yes, without tattoos—unsurprisingly probably to most people.”
He added, gesturing to his arm, that if he were to get a tattoo he would get the “Saints crest,” meaning the insignia of Southampton FC. “It’s a great logo. I think it’s one of the best football crests.”
Curious friends can be made in TV studios, and so it was that Holt later posted on Instagram a picture of her and Sunak captioned: “Can’t believe I met the prime minister today.” She told OK he was “really nice and really, really polite. He asked how much my tattoos were worth. He asked me which was the most painful one. It was short and sweet and we shook hands.”
The other revelation from his interview: “I’m a big sandwich person,” Sunak confessed, with Sky News later getting the scoop that his favorite was “a club sandwich, with chips and a Coke.”
On election night, Sunak told This Morning, he would be eating his favorite pie, described as a “very good pork pie with a special chutney and some cheese as well.”
For many Brits, tomorrow’s election will, if nothing else, bring a welcome end to end such inanity—and the political insanity alongside it.
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