“We just launched a campaign,” Rishi Sunak was telling a group of the type of people who are always referred to as “business leaders”, whatever that means. “It was a huge success. It was called Unicorn…” He paused, perhaps thinking that his memory couldn’t possibly be right, and looked offstage to an aide. “What was it called? ‘Unicorn Kingdom’!”

There was a certain amount of laughter in the room at this point, but it was polite. The “business leaders” spend a lot of time at events like this, and so know that a “tech unicorn” is a start-up business valued at over a billion pounds. Britain has quite a lot of them.

There is no place for non-believers in the Unicorn Kingdom

The rest of us can only ponder that “Unicorn Kingdom” is as good a name as any for the fantasy world many government ministers inhabit: a well-governed country where the roads are smooth and doctors and nurses never go on strike. In the Unicorn Kingdom, BMW and prosecco makers really did force the EU to give Britain a great trade deal, and food got cheaper after Brexit, just like Jacob Rees-Mogg promised.

Given the cruel nature of reality, it’s hardly a surprise that the prime minister prefers to live in the Unicorn Kingdom, greeted each morning by a rainbow (not the woke kind) with a pot of gold at either end.

“This government is unashamedly pro-business,” he told his audience. “It’s as simple as that.” Though of course if it were, he wouldn’t have needed to say it. The unspoken reason that he had gathered ministers to the “Business Connect” event is that, in recent years, the government’s main policy goal has been to make life as difficult as possible for exporters. Anyone who complained abut this found themselves frozen out. There is no place for non-believers in the Unicorn Kingdom.

All this, of course, is the fault of the wicked prime ministers who ruled the Unicorn Kingdom before Sunak. He had come to say that things were different now. “We want businesses small and large to know that this government has got your back,” he assured his audience.

The prime minister had kicked off the day with a sort of phone-in video chat on LinkedIn. If you don’t know LinkedIn, think of it as Facebook, but instead of lying about how happy your family is, you lie about how well your career is going. Sunak claims LinkedIn is his favourite social network, which may be the beigest words anyone has ever uttered.

The prime minister smiled anyway.

This event was his next stop. He was in his element, making a presentation to people who have MBAs like him, who use the same tailor as him, who like him know the fastest route to the First Class lounge in Terminal Five. How it must have hurt that they all shunned him when previous rulers of the Unicorn Kingdom were rude about them. But he was going to fix it all.

Mostly they were polite. Anya Hindmarch, designer of very expensive handbags, offered a warning about allowing creative industries to die off. “Losing your edge, a bit like sunburn, happens before you realise it,” she said, and Sunak looked a bit thoughtful, before recovering and thanking her for designing so many of the gifts he’d given his wife over the years. The cost of living crisis has hit each of us differently.

But then Gerry Murphy, the chairman of Burberry, spoke up. He had the air of a man who knows that change is coming in the Unicorn Kingdom. “It’s great to see a Conservative government obviously more business-friendly than some predecessor administrations,” he began. Due to the strange way in which the Unicorn Kingdom is governed, this was a reference to other Conservative governments, in which Sunak had also been a leading figure. But the prime minister smiled anyway.

It didn’t last.

Murphy continued  by attacking a “somewhat perverse” tax decision Sunak had taken to abolish tax-free shopping for tourists, which had, he said, “made the UK the least attractive shopping destination in Europe.” Sunak was looking polite now, using the expression that he presumably also has to deploy when the farmers in his North Yorkshire constituency ask him why Brexit hasn’t panned out the way he promised them it would.

The Burberry boss was still speaking, and he hadn’t finished. The tax hike was “a spectacular own goal”. Brexit was “a drag on trade”. Sunak was realising why other rulers of the Unicorn kingdom had kept people like this at a distance.

“That’s why we’re here,” he said, when Murphy had finally finished. “We’re here to listen. I hope you can see that we’re taking this seriously.”

As seriously as anyone takes anything in the Unicorn Kingdom.