News from Nowhere: Sleazy as Pie

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In December 2020, an old friend helped to broker a loan of £800,000 for the then Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who was rumoured to have been experiencing significant financial difficulties. The premier’s pecuniary vulnerability doesn’t appear to have been flagged up as a major security risk at the time. The intelligence community had doubtless considered the more salacious aspects of his private life worthy of greater concern.

Richard Sharp had known Mr. Johnson for nearly twenty years. He had acted as an adviser to him when he had served as Mayor of London. Mr. Sharp had also worked with Rishi Sunak at the investment bank Goldman Sachs and later advised Mr. Sunak (as Chancellor) on strategies for business support during the Covid-19 crisis.

In January 2021, Richard Sharp was confirmed in the role of chairman of the BBC, on Boris Johnson’s recommendation. This is a highly prestigious and influential position. In the last twenty years, Mr. Sharp has donated more than £400,000 to the British Conservative Party. 

The case has been referred for investigation to the UK’s Commissioner for Public Appointments. The Commissioner has had to recuse himself, because of his own relationship with Richard Sharp.

This is hardly the only news story threatening to undermine public confidence in the current government’s probity. Last summer, it was reported that the Chancellor, Nadhim Zahawi, was experiencing a number of difficulties with his taxes. In recent weeks, it has emerged that Mr. Zahawi (having become chairman of the Conservative Party) had agreed a settlement of approximately £5 million with the tax authorities. 

That sum included penalty payments for “carelessness” in his financial returns. “Carelessness” is an official euphemism for negligence. Despite Zahawi’s protestations, the chief executive of His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs has emphasised in this context that “there are no penalties for innocent errors”.

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak initially suggested that Mr. Zahawi had “already addressed this matter in full”, but later asked his own ethics adviser to review the case, when it emerged that there were “additional facts” that his party chair had failed to disclose to him. Mr. Sunak was eventually obliged to fire him for what was described as a “serious breach of the ministerial code”.

Nadhim Zahawi was also found to have transgressed the principles of public life, a set of expectations which apply to a range of roles, from politicians to the police.

As one BBC journalist supposed, it seemed incredible that the senior minister responsible for tax revenues had at the same time been under investigation for his tax affairs.

In April 2022, when Rishi Sunak himself was Chancellor, it was revealed that his wife had claimed non-domiciled status in order to avoid paying around £20 million in tax. This kind of thing doesn’t look great when you’re supposed to be running the Treasury. Nor is it the only messy blot in Mr. Sunak’s copybook. Indeed, questions have recently been raised in relation to his own tax returns.

While Mr. Sharp was arranging a generous loan for Mr. Johnson, the blond buffoon had been busy enjoying a series of social gatherings in Downing Street, parties which famously broke his own government’s pandemic lockdown rules. A parliamentary inquiry has since been established to investigate whether Johnson – who had repeatedly denied participation in such activities – had ever lied to the House of Commons about this.

Boris Johnson was fined for his involvement in those breaches. He was the first serving British premier ever to be sanctioned for lawbreaking while on the job. His Chancellor Rishi Sunak had accepted a similar penalty.

Last month, Mr. Sunak received a second fine from the police, this time for failing to wear a seat belt in a moving car. He’d been recording a video message at the time. He had quite literally posted the evidence against himself on social media for all the world to see. And so, he became the second ever serving British Prime Minister to be sanctioned for breaking the law while in office.

In the space of a year, then, two Chancellors have been embarrassed by revelations as to their personal tax affairs, and two Chancellors have received punitive fines. Two Prime Ministers have been fined for breaking the law, and one is now being investigated for lying to parliament and for his financial relationship with a man whom he appointed to a senior public position.

Meanwhile, the Deputy Prime Minister is facing multiple allegations of bullying. And the Home Secretary was reappointed less than a week after she’d been forced to quit for breaching the ministerial code.

Last November, another of Sunak’s Cabinet ministers had resigned just a fortnight into his new job when it emerged that he had sent expletive-laden messages to a senior colleague complaining that he’d not been invited to the social occasion of the decade, the funeral of Her Majesty The Queen.

In the highest echelons of the UK Cabinet, the Foreign Secretary looks reasonably clean: as clean as a man with neither guile nor wit can be. 

It may also be admitted that the current Chancellor appears reasonably honest and vaguely competent, at least when compared with his immediate predecessors – but in that context the bar’s hardly been set superhumanly high.

The ruling party’s reputation hasn’t been enhanced by the recent actions of its backbenchers. Owen Paterson took money to lobby for the interests of commercial companies. Chris Pincher made headlines following allegations of sexual assault. Neil Parish admitted viewing pornography on his phone in the House of Commons. And the increasingly eccentric Andrew Bridgen was last month suspended from his parliamentary party, after describing the pandemic vaccination campaign as a crime against humanity comparable with the work of the Third Reich. This came in the immediate wake of his suspension from the House of Commons for breaking financial rules.

Just last week, Mr. Sunak appointed as his party’s Deputy Chairman a man famous for denying that users of food banks really needed to use them at all, and for staging for the media a fake doorstep encounter with a random voter (in truth a friend of his) during the 2019 election campaign.

The Tories’ recent catalogue of cavalier dealings, sharp practices, malfeasance, and misconduct has added up to what the Labour Party chair recently described as a “quagmire of sleaze”. None of it looks good for the British Conservative Party, who’ve been feeling the shame and the pain all the way from its grassroots to its grandees. 

Even their self-styled reputation for financial competence suffered a mortal blow last autumn when the shortest-serving Prime Minister in the nation’s history decided for reasons of her own to hazard a rash fiscal experiment which quickly caused a market crash. The party of the architects of the economic disaster of Brexit can no longer claim to offer a safe pair of hands.

There are still those amongst Tory ranks who seem unable to comprehend their own failings, not least Liz Truss herself. Only last week, the blundering ex-premier published a lengthy essay in the Sunday Telegraph which claimed that her “genuinely transformative” agenda had been made a “scapegoat for problems that had been brewing over a number of months”. Much to her successor’s chagrin, her economic insanity retains its supporters among his own MPs.

This has all converged in a perfect storm of embarrassment and disgrace, one which makes Tory pariah Matt Hancock look like something of a golden boy – rather than, as he is, a mercenary self-publicist and libidinous fool who’s only a trilby away from becoming a Spoonerism of himself. 

Indeed, it’s enough to make seasoned political observers feel like the nineteen-nineties are coming back. Because, yes, they’re coming back with a vengeance.

Following his own government’s inadvertent wrecking of the British economy, as the pound crashed out of the European exchange rate mechanism in September 1992, John Major’s troubled administration had been plagued by accusations of what became known as “Tory sleaze”, with the likes of David Mellor, Neil Hamilton, Tim Smith, Tim Yeo, Jeremy Wiggen, Jeffrey Archer, and eventually even Mr. Major himself hit by accusations of financial or romantic improprieties – or both.

From extra-marital infidelities to taking cash from businesses for asking questions in parliament, it was a decade in which the Tories practised (and in fact perfected) a liberal array of vices, and in whose immediate wake their party’s deputy chairman was imprisoned for perjury and perverting the course of justice, in relation to a libel case he had brought in response to allegations that he’d arranged for a large cash payment to convince a courtesan of his acquaintance to quit the country.

The Conservatives’ humiliation was compounded through the mid-nineties by the fact that their leader had set out his agenda in terms of a return to traditional values – a shift, as he’d called it, “back to basics”.

A quarter of a century later, it hasn’t of course helped the Tory cause that, on his arrival in Downing Street, Rishi Sunak had promised “integrity, professionalism, and accountability at every level”. (One’s immediately reminded of Liz Truss’s pledge to grow the economy. At least Boris Johnson had never sworn not to carouse like a Roman emperor during a period of unprecedented global crisis.)

This sorry situation feels like the consequence of a party grown arrogant and out of touch, a party too long in power.

Some of these controversies may yet come to nothing. Those involved may be vindicated by ongoing inquiries. But the general public has an undiscriminating memory for scandal. Outraged headlines endure well beyond the lifetimes of their original narratives. Mud sticks, and so does other stuff.

Reeling from the biggest hit to their standards of living for two generations, British voters will be looking for someone to punish when they next head to the polls. 

Even traditional Tory supporter and British rock legend Sir Rod Stewart last month called on the government to go.

And, unless Keir Starmer’s Labour Party play into the hands of their enemies in the tabloid press and manage to pull off one of their most extraordinary policy gaffes (in a long history of extraordinary policy gaffes), then it seems very likely that it will be Westminster’s true blue sultans of sleaze who end up back in the electoral wilderness with mightier dollops of political egg on their faces than it would take to make the proverbial whale omelette, with enough to spare for a generous side-order of orca soufflé, and perhaps even a cheeky slice of walrus quiche – or, for that matter, a self-inflicted custard pie smacked right into the eyes.