Professionalism. Integrity. Accountability. Remember them? The three pillars on which Rishi Sunak promised to build his government. On the off chance he could differentiate his administration from those of his predecessors. Some hope. That holy trinity has long since checked out.
Now it’s just got a whole lot worse. Starting with Sunak himself. Rish! the Recidivist. Having picked up one fixed-penalty notice for a lockdown birthday party with Boris Johnson, he’s gone on to pick up another for not wearing a seatbelt. Hardly the biggest crime, certainly. But certainly one of the dimmest. After all, he was only caught because he happened to film himself breaking the law. Call that professional? He’s never going to make a career criminal. Not sure that not knowing or ignoring the law counts as integrity. Which leaves us with accountability. And I guess that pleading guilty and paying the £100 fine does just about qualify. Though whether we want a serial offender as prime minister is another matter.
Still, Sunak is undeniably a step up the greasy ethics pole from Boris Johnson. AKA the Convict. The man who continues to take the Tory party into the sewer even from the backbenches. You can tell he knows he’s busted. Where was he at the weekend? Visiting President Zelenskiy in Ukraine. Where he always goes when he’s bang to rights. It’s his subconscious crying out for absolution. His way of acting out his guilt. His crime this time? Same as it ever was. Sleaze and incontinence. A basic refusal to engage with the normal rules of behaviour.
When most people are hard up, they cut back their lifestyle. Johnson, not so much. He is the exception. The man to whom the usual rules don’t apply. His needs must be satisfied. So a Tory donor, Richard Sharp, put the cabinet secretary in touch with a long lost relative who happened to be offering an £800k credit facility. For wallpaper, alimony, fun and excess? Though not for accommodation. Boris had already found someone else to stump up for that. In the meantime, Sharp was appointed as chair of the BBC. Because obviously there was no question that Dicky Sharp was the right man for the job.
Only it turned out that a loose regard for potential conflicts of interest was contagious. Because when Sharp was chosen by Johnson to head up the BBC, it never once occurred to him to mention it at any of his pre-appointment hearings before the DCMS select committee. And there we all were. Being told by the Conservatives that the BBC was staffed by a bunch of leftwingers, who were hellbent on bringing down the government. But now we know better.
Then we come on to the man of the moment. Nadhim “He Pays What He Wants” Zahawi. Or rather, hubris has kicked in after a long career in business with Jeffrey Archer, not to mention claiming for the heating of his stables on parliamentary expenses – who hasn’t done that? And he now finds he has to pay what the HMRC wants. Somewhere along the line, HMRC appears to have hit Zahawi with a penalty as well as the unpaid tax. Even then, Nadhim doth protest too much, saying the mistake was the result of carelessness. Here’s the weird thing, though. When millionaires say they have been careless with the tax department, they have never carelessly paid too much. We don’t get to see them weeping with joy as they get an unexpected rebate. The accounting errors are always in their favour.
And what of Rish!’s involvement in all this? Did he not wonder if there might have been a conflict of interest in Zahawi – or the chancellor as he was then – negotiating his own deal with HMRC? Of course he didn’t. This was the sort of thing that could literally happen to anyone. Too trivial to mention. Because that’s the kind of liberal attitude to paying tax Sunak wanted to encourage among Tory donors. Zahawi: the perfect welcoming committee. Up until Monday morning, Zahawi had Sunak’s full support. Now Sunak has kicked things into the long grass by handing things over to his newly appointed ethics adviser. Somewhat late in the day.
But even if Rish! was happy enough with the professionalism, integrity and accountability in his party – a view not shared by many of his MPs – Labour can spot sleaze when it sees it. So it was no surprise that its deputy leader, Angela Rayner, secured an urgent question on the quality of vetting procedures in government. This was just a general question, insisted the speaker, Lindsay Hoyle. It wasn’t about anyone in particular. Yeah, right. The paymaster general, Jeremy Quin, reluctantly got to his feet. Pain and suffering was etched on his face. Lying doesn’t come as easy to Quin as it does to some of his colleagues. The rules were whatever the rules were, he said. He had no reason to assume they had not been followed as he had gone out of his way not to find out.
Rayner stormed in. How could the government not see there was a clear conflict of interest? When everyone else in the country could. How could we trust a word Zahawi said? How come Zahawi was banned from getting a knighthood but not from serving in the cabinet? Were there lesser standards required for being in government? And how come No 10 had changed its story about what it knew and what it didn’t? Did Zahawi have some hold over the prime minister?
Three Tory MPs stood up to make a lacklustre defence of the government. Could we just forget about the whole thing until the ethics adviser reported back some time in 2030? But most sat in a glum silence. It felt like the end of days. A moral decay. The SNP’s John Nicolson raised the Sharp case. Was this transparency? Or merely Tory transparency. An opaque transparency. Quin tried fobbing opposition MPs off but finally remembered he had his own integrity to consider. So he said he “genuinely” couldn’t say whether Zahawi had been telling the truth about his tax situation before he got busted. Zahawi had been cut loose. Sort of.
In a TV clip, Sunak went on to say that “integrity” really mattered to him. But it doesn’t. Integrity is an action. If Sunak really cared he’d have fired Zahawi and made sure Sharp stood down from the BBC. Don’t hold your breath.
