Who puts the bins out – and who makes the bed? What we’ve learned about the Sunaks is shocking...

... but not at all surprising. Who would have thought: the most famous (and wealthiest) couple in the land are victims of domestic tedium, just like everybody else, says Sean O’Grady

In the pair’s interview with Grazia , Mrs Sunak reveals she calls her husband ‘Rish’ (Getty )

Rishi Sunak has been prime minister of the United Kingdom for a little less than a year and a half (feels longer, I know), and may not be PM for that much longer. His poll ratings are, fair to say, dismal. Beyond dismal, indeed. He’s about as popular as Liz Truss was by the time her foolishness forced herself out of office, which is not an encouraging place to be when you’re about to ask the country to give the Conservatives another five years in office.

He’s tried tax cuts, he’s tried making Brexit a bit less harsh, he’s tried making peace in Northern Ireland; he’s tried to refloat the punctured dinghy that is the Rwanda plan. But, to borrow the words of George Galloway/Shania Twain, it don’t impress us much.

So now he’s been and gone to Grazia magazine, with his lovely wife, Akshata Murty, and done one of those awful, domestic-focused joint interviews that can so easily go horribly wrong, and which assuredly have never rescued a political career from certain doom. There’s a clip online, plus an extensive write-up. He doesn’t mention hospital waiting lists, the Budget or the mild recession the rest of us are going through just now.

Perhaps the Sunaks were thinking of the last time such a similar cosy little chat was arranged with the media, the infamous appearance by Theresa and Philip May on The One Show. When you’re taking your lead from the Philip and Theresa May playbook, you know your prime ministership is on the skids.

That was when the then prime minister famously remarked that “there are boy jobs and there are girl jobs”, and Philip insisted that while he does take the bins out, he decides when that happens.

Funnily enough, chores crop up quite a bit in the Sunaks’ “interrogation”, and, indeed, true to the Mays’ dictum, it’s the boy who drags the wheelie bins out: “It’s a pain – you have to go all the way down there,” he quips.

Of course, the Sunaks could have copied the Johnsons’ approach to such things and just left the garbage, dog mess and post-party stains until the Downing Street cleaners or just some casual visitor came in and decided they’d have to sort the place out for them. Which, funnily enough, is what Rishi – or “Rish”, as Mrs Sunak calls him – had to do when Boris and Liz had finished with the country.

There is one moment of excitement in the Grazia write-up, when it discloses that “fights about the dishwasher are also commonplace”. For a moment, I imagined a furious Akshata lobbing ramekins at the prime minister, and he returning fire with a cheeseboard, catching the chancellor of the exchequer on the head as he pops in to talk about employers’ national insurance contributions.

Of course, the account actually merely confirms that Rish is the fastidious one in this relationship, and Akshata a bit of a slob. Apparently, when she was a student, she even ate in bed – and left grimy plates ON THE DUVET! The shame of it.

A couple of thoughts cross my mind as I contemplate the flawless life of this couple. The first is: “For heaven’s sake! You’re worth about a billion quid between you. A thousand million pounds. You’ll never spend it. Your time is valuable and much better spent not doing the ironing. Why on earth don’t you just get a home help in, like any normal people would if they were as obscenely loaded as you are? What’s the matter with you?”

Such questions hang curiously unasked and unanswered by the Grazia team. More to the point, and reassuringly for me, I had very little difficulty in reminding myself that it really doesn’t matter to me who makes the Sunaks’ bed or even if it ever gets made at all. Why should I care?

I had much the same reaction when Akshata introduced her guy at the Conservative Party conference last year, which… well, didn’t really stop the electoral rot.

The private lives of our politicians are wildly irrelevant. Yes, okay, if Rishi had admitted that he likes to unwind after a tough day running the country by torturing the cat before he heads for bed, or he plots how to murder Michael Gove, I’d probably be a bit concerned about his capacity for compassion. But, actually, his pre-sleep decompression routine just involves watching old episodes of Friends, again, which is almost, but not quite, as disturbing.