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Just before Rishi Sunak became Prime Minister in late 2022, a morose headline in the wine and spirit trade newspaper Harpers announced ‘Teetotal PM headed for No 10’.

Now we learn that skinny Rishi doesn’t just avoid alcohol. He fasts, too. Once a week, despite all the strain of trying to run the country, Mr Sunak goes 36 hours without eating. Not a sausage for one and a half days a week! Is the man a maniac?

Is fasting for so long even possible? Or might it actually a good idea?

Owing to my monk-like tendencies, though more likely because they spotted my expanding girth and purpling snout, the Mail dared me to match the PM. Could I forego all nosebag and naughty drink for 36 hours?

The call to abstinence arrived after a weekend when I had indulged heavily on cottage pie, lemon syllabub and a pile of homemade biscuits, and had just downloaded a Monday breakfast of fiendishly good kidneys in cream and sherry. 

Though I would like to claim it was journalistic duty that made me accept the Sunak starvation challenge, it is possible that sheer guilt, plus a bubble or two of indigestion, had more to do with it.

Quentin Letts only allowed himself water, black coffee, tea or sugar-free fizzy drink

Quentin Letts only allowed himself water, black coffee, tea or sugar-free fizzy drink

He takes a  leaf out of Rishi Sunak's book and attempts to fast for 36 hours

He takes a  leaf out of Rishi Sunak’s book and attempts to fast for 36 hours

The Prime Minister, pictured on This Morning yesterday, is also teetotal as well as fasting during the beginning of the week

The Prime Minister, pictured on This Morning yesterday, is also teetotal as well as fasting during the beginning of the week 

The mission: to exist from 5pm on Monday until 5am on Wednesday without solids, drinking only water, black coffee or tea. Sugar-free fizzy drink would also be excusable.

‘You’re going to do what?’ laughed my daughter Eveleen, 25, who with her boyfriend George shares digs with me in London. Eveleen and George are tremendous foodies. ‘You’ll never last the course!’

My wife Lois, digesting the news from our home in Herefordshire, cried ‘what a horrible, horrible idea’ and declared herself relieved to be out of my orbit for the duration of the fast. Lois is a trencherwoman.

My octogenarian mother simply wondered if Rishi’s fasting was a religious thing, for Mr Sunak is an observant Hindu and they can go in for this sort of thing. Mind you, so do Muslims with Ramadan and Christians with Lent. However, Lenten self-abnegation for most Anglicans nowadays is about little more than giving up tipsy cake from Ash Wednesday to Easter.

After accepting the Mail’s commission I did not have long to brace myself for the witching hour on Monday afternoon when the fast was to begin.

Clearly it would be a good idea to put something in the petrol-tank beforehand, so I had a 2pm lunch of baked beans on buttered bagel: roughage, sugar, carbs, fat, all on one plate, plus some peanut brittle for pudding.

In choosing this final meal the condemned man was acting more from instinct than dietary science, but I could have found plenty of advice online. 

Intermittent fasting has become quite a fashion. Some fasts are more extreme than others. One popular pattern is to do a daily 16/8 hour fast, when you have an ‘eating window’ of eight hours a day. 

A colleague in the parliamentary press gallery, Harriet, is on 16/8 and she is a picture of health. You have a late breakfast, early supper, then go 16 hours without scoff. For half of that time you will possibly be asleep.

Fasters of a sterner disposition may opt for an 18/6 hour breakdown every day, or even 20/4 hour.

Other forms of intermittent fasting divide into days. With 5:2, for instance, you eat normally five days a week and then, on the two fasting days, cut down to 800 or fewer calories.

Experts suggest that intermittent fasting can help weight-loss and may reduce the risks of heart disease and type-two diabetes. Yet there are also downsides, among them, loss of energy and a slump in morale, which is another way of saying that you could become a bit crabby.

A prime minister needs to avoid throwing telephones at aides. And in such a public position as PM there are other complications such as campaign-trail photocalls at food outlets, and official entertaining.

If, say, the president of France is coming to dinner, you can hardly sit there with an empty plate and a glass of miserable water saying ‘don’t mind me, Emmanuel, I’m on my weekly fast’. It might cause a diplomatic incident.

Monday 5pm – And so it begins. I am in the House of Lords press gallery, listening to a debate on the Rwanda bill, when I realise my fast has officially started. Goodbye to nosh for 36 hours. 

And it has already three hours since lunch, so I am looking at a 39 hours stretch. Gulp. Or rather, no more gulping. I feel like Thor Heyerdahl setting off across the Pacific in the fragile Kon-Tiki. 

Since infancy, I have been a chubby chap, keen on my tucker. Would I survive? Or would this Kon-Tiki founder? In a day and a half we would know.

Monday evening – I arrive at the flat to find Eveleen and George cooking a prawn pasta dish for their supper and some cumin-scented lamb flatbreads for their packed lunch the next day. Delicious smells waft through the flat. Agony. 

I reach instinctively for the corkscrew before remembering that on teetotal Rishi’s diet, no booze is permitted. I close myself in my bedroom with a glass of Tesco diet ginger ale and hope a Hammond Innes novel would take my mind off food. Funnily enough, it does.

Monday night – Sleep well. Best night’s kip for ages. Maybe going without supper is a good tactic. But I dream of being in a prison. Being put on any sort of regime does not suit my disobedient nature. Rishi must be more comfortable with conforming to rules.

During the pandemic, Mr Sunak created the Eat Out to Help Out scheme

During the pandemic, Mr Sunak created the Eat Out to Help Out scheme

Tuesday morning – Confession number one: I eat my daily statin pill. Yum yum. I am also pathetically grateful for the taste of peppermint when brushing my teeth, though I resist doing what we prep-school boys did when hungry, which was to eat Signal toothpaste. 

The chief impression of this fast so far is not one of hunger but of dullness. Without food, life is blander. Fasting is a bore.

Tuesday 11am – Halfway there and I swear I am already feeling lighter but colder. I should have worn a string vest. Let’s hope 10 Downing Street has good central heating for Rishi. 

Then the man himself pops  up on ITV’s This Morning and admits, blithely, that during his fasts he sometimes has the occasional nut. The cheat! It doubles my determination not to crack.

Tuesday 1pm – Thunder in Westminster. Then I realise it is my tummy rumbling. It wants its lunch and it can’t have any. 

Except… confession number two: I do eat four pills that are the last in a course of steroids I was prescribed for a bad chest. They are only small tablets but I treated each one like a mouthful of roast chicken. Then they get stuck in my throat and I have to quaff lots of water. Morale is slipping.

Tuesday 5pm – As the 24-hour mark passes, my inner rev-counter is dropping. Climbing a flight of stairs, my legs feel like jellies. Is that a headache as well? Brrrr, wish I had worn a thicker coat. And my teeth are feeling a little furry. 

Walking back to the flat, I am assailed by cooking aromas from the street. Eveleen arrives home with fish and chips for her and George. They also prepare chicken thighs in sesame seeds for their Wednesday lunch. 

I have drunk so much water, coffee and diet lemonade in recent hours that I am peeing like a dray horse. How does Rishi cope with that during important meetings?

Tuesday night – Okay, the first 24 hours were doable, but this is now becoming hard. I am seriously peckish. As the old Northern Irish expression goes: ‘I could eat a wee dog with sore eyes.’ 

Sleep badly, assailed by a nightmare in which a cadaverous surgeon (looking like Samuel Beckett, or is it Rishi?) is operating on my intestines. I wake at 2am, at 3am, at 3.30am, each time being disappointed that I cannot yet have a Scooby snack.

Wednesday morning – Eyes ping open at 5.45am. I can eat! A banana and a bowl of bran flakes fly down the hatch. Normality has returned. 

Well, almost. I definitely feel thinner. And I feel like a traveller who has returned from an other-worldly place.

Having completed the ordeal, I regard our dear Prime Minister in a new light. In a way, he becomes a little more enigmatic. To fast weekly certainly runs counter to the normal political instinct to break bread with strangers.

During my fast, food kept threatening to consume my thoughts. I kept clock-watching to see how many more hours of cavernous hunger had to be endured.

I looked at other people in a different light, becoming quite indignant about what gluttons they all were. Is that how Rishi Sunak views us? 

It is to his credit that he does not boast about his fast. Few other politicians would have kept such a weekly achievement to themselves for so long.

What drives this habit? Is it Californian-style interest in new-world detoxes or is it part of his Hindu heritage for clean-living and continence? Or a gritty desire, in a competitive and dissolute occupation, to prove himself and stay fit?

To maintain the tempo of official life while committing to this seriously testing regime is remarkable. Slim Rishi is a bigger man than some of us expected. 

I could possibly manage a 16/8 fasting routine for a few days but never a weekly starvation like this. 

So your sketchwriter, ladies and gentlemen, is sloping back to the kidneys in cream and sherry. I may not last quite so long, but life will have more savour.

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This post first appeared on Daily mail

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