Photograph: Vuk Valcic/ZUMA Press Wire/Shutterstock
For all Rishi Sunak’s claims to be a trustworthy prime minister, he is, in fact, in the mould of Boris Johnson. He has made misleading claims from the start of his premiership, and continues to do so. Take his first prime minister’s questions on 26 October last year. To murmurs of approval from Conservative MPs, he told Labour’s Richard Burgon: “We will always support our hardworking nurses.”
To drive home his support, Sunak added: “That is why, when I was chancellor, we reintroduced the nurses’ bursary.” This was a misleading claim, as the new prime minister would have been well aware. It is true that, as chancellor, Sunak offered a new educational grant of £5,000 a year (increasing to £8,000 in some cases) for all nursing students on courses from September 2020. However, this fell significantly short of the bursary system, which had earlier been scrapped by the Conservative government.
