Revelations over Tory party chair’s tax affairs come as the Doomsday Clock moves closer to midnight
Rishi the recidivist. To add to his fixed-penalty notice for joining Boris Johnson at his birthday party during lockdown, the prime minister has now clocked up a second for not wearing a seatbelt. Not the worst crime, but one of the dumbest. Sunak only got caught because he filmed himself breaking the law. Not sure Rishi is cut out for life as a career criminal. Even so, he appears to be rather more trustworthy than some of his colleagues. A low bar, admittedly. First there is Johnson, who didn’t appear to think there was anything questionable about an old mucker, Richard Sharp, allegedly helping him to secure a loan facility just weeks before he recommended Sharp to be chair of the BBC. And what is it with Boris that he needs £800,000 to maintain his lifestyle when he already has friends paying for his accommodation? You can tell Johnson knows he’s done something wrong because he sloped off to Ukraine to see Volodymyr Zelenskiy at the weekend. Then there’s Nadhim Zahawi, the Tory party chair, who appears to have accidentally failed to fill in his tax return correctly, threatened journalists who wanted to reveal the story and negotiated his own settlement with HMRC when he was … chancellor. He now can’t even remember how much of the £4m or so he forked out was a penalty and says any irregularity was “carelessness”. Weird that the very rich never carelessly pay too much tax. Zahawi wants to stay on but my bet is he is on borrowed time. Gone by the end of the month. So much for Sunak’s promise of a Tory party guided by “professionalism, integrity and accountability”.
