Back to basics: can Sunak stave off return of Tory sleaze?

Rishi Sunak is facing serious questions over the integrity of his party and his government after a trio of scandals hit the headlines this weekend.

The PM has ordered what The Independent described as a “potentially far-reaching investigation” into Conservative Party chair Nadhim Zahawi’s ministerial declarations, “but it could extend to his prior tax arrangement and whether he lied to the media”, the news site added. Sunak has so far “defied calls to sack the Tory party chair over the multimillion-pound tax dispute he resolved by paying a penalty”.

Sunak’s Zahawi headache came at the same time as The Sunday Times reported that BBC chair Richard Sharp was “involved in talks” over arranging a loan guarantee of up to £800,000 for the then prime minister Boris Johnson, just weeks before Johnson recommended Sharp for the top BBC role.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

And yesterday Sunak was fined by Lancashire Police for failing to wear a seatbelt in a moving car while filming a social media video. It is the second fine he has received while in government, the first coming after attending a lockdown-breaking birthday party for Johnson in Downing Street in June 2020. Some of these problems “might not be of Sunak’s making”, said Politico’s London Playbook, “but he’s now dealing with the fallout”.

What did the papers say?

It was only in October that Sunak promised, on the steps of 10 Downing Street as he took office, that his government would have “integrity, professionalism and accountability at every level”. But now his “trio of promises” have “careered into a trio of incidents” that pose big questions for him and his premiership, said the BBC’s political editor Chris Mason.

The revelations over Zahawi’s tax affairs, as well as those to do with the BBC chair, are to some degree “the exhaust fumes of the Boris Johnson era”, said Mason. Even so, both pose questions for the government now, although the decision Sunak faces over Zahawi is “simple” – “sack him, or keep him”?

That Sunak “has been fined for not wearing a seatbelt, for instance, is in and of itself a trivial story”, said the Financial Times’s Stephen Bush. “But when added to the story of the former chancellor’s tax error, it risks creating a general impression that it is a ridiculous government full of hapless, careless people”, he added.

The three incidents are reminiscent of the “dying days of John Major’s doomed administration before Tony Blair’s new Labour election landslide in the late 1990s”, said historian Nigel Jones in The Spectator.

Then it seemed “hardly a week went by without some hapless Tory Minister or MP being caught out in an embarrassing or ridiculous situation”, and all the while “Major was advocating a ‘back to basics’ return to rigorous moral and ethical standards”.

By themselves, even this trio of mishaps might be regarded as “trivial”, continued Jones. “But taken together they give out the distinct whiff of a government in decay which has lost control of the narrative and can do little or nothing to prevent itself from spiralling helplessly down towards defeat at the next election.”

But “this lot are arguably worse than Major’s” fallen ministers, said The Mirror’s associate editor Kevin Maguire. Now “grubby behaviour” is viewed as “perfectly normal” by the guilty parties while “Cabinet colleagues eagerly, nonchalantly pretending nothing’s wrong while basking in ignorance about terrible details”. Sunak is either “incompetent or malign”, continued Maguire. Either way, “this miasma will do to him in the 2020s what Tory sordidness did to Major in the 1990s”.

Not everyone is so sure though. Both Zahawi and Johnson’s supposed misdeamonours came when Sunak was not in power and he “may find himself protected from some of the splatter… given his role in bringing down his former cabinet colleague”, said Sky News’s political correspondent Rob Powell. Equally there is “the tendency of Westminster scandal to lower the public’s opinion of all politicians, rather than those of one specific party”, he wrote.

What next?

During a visit to a Northamptonshire hospital Sunak told reporters that “integrity and accountability” were important to him and “there are questions that need answering” over the Zahawi debacle. He added that Zahawi would not stand down from his role as Conservative Party chairman while the investigation took place.

Sunak could also have to “decide the fate” of BBC chairman Sharp, who was his boss during his time at Goldman Sachs and who also later acted as Sunak’s Covid adviser, said The Telegraph. Sharp said he had not been involved in a loan or a guarantee or arranged any financing for Johnson, and has called for a “review” into any conflict of interest he may have had. Both the commissioner for public appointments and the corporation itself are to investigate the matter.

Looking ahead, though, “these scandals are unlikely to rival NHS pressure and cost-of-living as issues that will influence the next election and determine how rough a ride the prime minister has with his MPs in the months ahead”, said Sky News’s Powell.

Also, “don’t forget that Sunak remains the government’s best political asset: he is still more popular than the party”, said the FT’s Bush. But “a row over tax” means Labour “can relitigate all those old attack lines about Sunak and non-doms”, which could mean this is still “painful and embarrassing for the prime minister”, Bush concluded.