Rishi is embroiled in a scandal involving his wife. So, a couple of millennia earlier, was Julius. Yet the two men handled the scandals differently, which is a comment not only on them but also on their times.
The earlier scandal occurred when a patrician politician, Publius Clodius Pulcher, tried to seduce Caesar’s wife, Pompeia.
Publius, it has to be said, had a rep as quite a goer. This he proved by dressing as a woman to sneak into a girls-only party hosted by Pompeia. Historians still argue whether Publius had designs on Pompeia or one of the vestal virgins present.
One way or the other, the subsequent trial established Pompeia’s innocence. In spite of that, Caesar divorced her, saying: “My wife ought not even to be under suspicion”.
The scandal involving the Chancellor’s wife, Akshata Murty, proves the truth of the title above – whatever Rishi Sunak’s self-image. And the nature of the brouhaha is as different as the two men are.
Unlike Pompeia, Akshata Murty has had no aspersion cast on her sexual behaviour. It’s her fiscal practices that have produced so much public indignation that the Ukraine receded into the background of reported news.
Mrs Sunak has taken advantage of a loophole in our tax laws by claiming a non-domiciled status. That means she doesn’t have to pay British tax on any income generated abroad.
We aren’t talking tuppence here and there. Mrs Sunak’s father is an Indian billionaire, and his daughter owns 0.91 per cent of the shares in his company. Quite apart from the staggering value of that position, her dividends alone amounted to over £11 million last year.
The non-dom law may be hard for the masses to swallow, but it’s still the law. As Julius Caesar might have said, dura lex, sed lex. It goes back to the time of the Raj, when British colonisers had to be encouraged to keep the Empire going.
Surprisingly, this provenance hasn’t so far been brought up by Mr Sunak’s detractors, and I hope I’m not giving them a tip for another angle of attack. Any association with the erstwhile Empire, no matter how tangential, is these days cause for at least abject apologies, but I hope this sleeping dog will be allowed to lie.
Neither Mrs nor Mr Sunak has done anything illegal, and no one is claiming otherwise. Since envy has never been expunged from human nature, their wealth can be annoying to some, but that slap in the public’s face hasn’t yet been criminalised.
Yet the scandal is a crossroads on which legality, ethics and politics intersect, with a rich potential for head-on collisions. Now we’ve dismissed legality as a serious consideration, let’s look at the other two avenues.
Modernity is as obsessed with form as it’s dismissive of substance. Whole armies of expensive lawyers, accountants and consultants keep a watchful eye on the letter of tax laws, while ignoring their spirit.
If it’s legal, it’s moral – such is the central commandment of the religion called Modernity. The reverse doesn’t necessarily apply though. Thus a man who protects his family by killing a feral intruder may go to prison even though he has done nothing immoral. But when it comes to fiscal shenanigans, legality subsumes morality.
The non-dom laws apply to citizens of a foreign country who have lived in Britain for less than 15 years. However, one may suggest that a foreign citizen married to someone occupying the second-highest political post in the UK, and therefore living in a Downing Street house funded by the taxpayer, may want to forgo climbing through the non-dom loophole.
Some may even question the propriety of a Chancellor’s wife not being a British subject. As a foreign citizen, Mrs Sunak owes no statutory allegiance to the very Crown of which her husband is a minister. That doesn’t make him (or her) a traitor, but it does make the Sunaks open to questions about divided loyalties.
After all, the religion said Crown is obligated to uphold says this about husband and wife: “twain shall be one flesh: so they are no more twain, but one flesh”. When it comes to a Chancellor and his wife, twain would be well-advised to be not just one flesh, but also one political entity.
I’m sure Mrs Sunak’s citizenship application would go through without a hitch should she wish to pledge allegiance to the country whose finances her husband oversees. But I understand that money talks louder than anything else – that’s another endearing commandment of Modernity.
After all, Rishi won’t remain Chancellor for ever. He’ll make a good go at moving from 11 to 10 Downing Street but, should that fail, I don’t quite see him on the back benches. He’ll probably try to become a mogul to end all moguls, and every saved million will be a step towards that upper rung.
Having touched on legality and ethics, we have thus got into politics, and yet again I have to bemoan the staggering incompetence of our politicians. They’ve devoted their lives to gaining power by charting their way into public support, yet they seem to have learned next to nothing.
Wise policies would be the most obvious door-opener, but we don’t live in the Roman Empire, nor even in the British one. Our voting public doesn’t really expect wise policies from the government, and it wouldn’t be able to recognise them anyway.
If expertly spun, any policy can be sold as wise, provided no wholesale murder of firstborn sons is mandated. All a politician should do is keep his nose clean and refrain from doing too much damage.
Mr Sunak has failed on the second requirement by raising taxes at a time when any competent economist knows they must be cut. Overtaxing a flagging economy is a proven strategy for turning a recession into a depression, but Rishi isn’t really to blame.
He lives in a country trampled over by a whole herd of sacred cows, all covered by the mighty bull of the NHS. And sacred cows may be milked, but they can’t be slaughtered.
The country can’t afford to continue pledging allegiance to the welfare state, and not only for economic but also for moral reasons. But that battle can’t be won, nor even engaged.
No MP will stay in Parliament for long if he questions the very foundations on which our economy rests. And a Chancellor cutting NHS and other social funding enough to make a difference will stay in the job for roughly as long as it’ll take him to write a resignation letter.
However, if Rishi can’t be blamed for his de rigueur economic sabotage (“It’s all the zeitgeist’s fault, m’lord”), he certainly can be blamed for his inept handling of political mechanics.
Like so many chancellors before him, he wants to become PM, which means unseating Johnson. Now Johnson has shown his own lack of political nous by holding what Pushkin called ‘a feast in time of plague’, otherwise known as Partygate.
Everything secret shall become manifest, to quote the Good Book again – especially if someone has a vested interest in making it so. The only way for the general public to get the news of the Number 10 party was for someone present, or perhaps a next-door neighbour, to spill the beans.
Since Messrs Johnson and Sunak are seen not only as cabinet colleagues, but also political rivals, it would be consistent with fallen human nature to surmise that the leak came from someone associated with Mr Sunak or even him himself.
Putting the political shoe on the other foot, it’s similarly likely that the general public was made aware of Mrs Sunak’s tax status by someone who’d rather see Mr Johnson extend his lease on Number 10. It’s beyond me to imagine how the two men for whom politics is their whole life could leave themselves open to so much mud-slinging.
Score a massive one for the PM, who has been running up the score anyway, what with his good war. Mr Johnson’s passionate commitment to the Ukraine can’t be fully understood outside the realm of British domestic politics.
The Sunaks are desperately trying to stop the rot. Akshata Murty has moved out of the official residence and undertaken to start paying UK taxes on non-UK income. Her husband has referred the case to the ethics committee, confidently expecting absolution.
That’s unlikely to be enough. If Rishi doesn’t want to kiss his ambitions good-bye, he should do a Julius and divorce Akshata Murty, citing the same aphoristic phrase. But, God forbid, not in the original Latin. He can’t come across not only as a fat cat but also as a cultural snob.
Uxor mea ne suspecta quidem debet, in case you are interested.
“He Himself” please, not “him himself”.
Otherwise, spot on, Mr Boot!
I’m afraid you are wrong on this point of grammar. It should definitely be “…associated with him”, not “he”. The use here is objective, not subjective.
We are both in error, I think. It is your “him himself” that is the first error: the “him” is redundant. Just “himself” would have been adequate and correct. My earlier contribution is wrong, as you state; I admit the error.
Oh, no! Tax avoidance! Shameful! It never ceases to amaze me that Western media froth at the mouth to report when they feel some one-percenter is not paying his full share of taxes. It’s as though the government is entitled to take as much of our income as they want and we should be happy, or even grateful, to hand over up to 100% of it. It is rarely reported that the government is already taking too much and wasting nearly every penny. And, of course, it is never anyone on the left who gets investigated. We must assume that George Soros, Bill Gates, et al, pay what is demanded – or even a bit more (a la Charles Lindbergh). During his many campaigns for the presidency, I have not heard any mainstream media reports on the accumulated wealth of America’s most famous (living) socialist, Barry Sanders. Nobody questions the Clinton’s wealth, not even when they were renting out White House bedrooms (in a move that predicted the current trend of treating residences as hotels). Who among us would pay more than legally required? Anyone with such an inclination probably gives to a deserving charity, not government.
That (right-wing, or conservative) man over there behind that tree is not paying enough tax! Get him!
I agree with every word you say, except the political designation of Sunak. I see him as neither right-wing nor conservative. The Clintons’ finacial machinations are indeed regrettably underinvestigated, especiallt those going back to their time in Arkansas. And it’s true, the Left insist on seeing no moral distinction between tax-evasion and tax-avoidance.
I did not mean to imply that the Minister is right-wing or conservative. It certainly reads that way. But he is at least associated with the Tory side of things, thus he is a target for the media.
The hypocrisy of the general British public never ceases to amaze me. I detest this notion that politicians are this wicked class of people, entirely separate from the purity of the common bloke. The latter of whom would sell nuclear secrets to the Russians if it meant another trip to Benidorm per annum. No, Bojo is precisely the leader they deserve.
Exactly! Which common bloke is prepared to pay more tax than legally required? So why would the minister’s wife? I will be working on mine this evening and I will not be adding any extra out of the kindness of my heart, or out of regard for our deserving leaders!
Taxation, like the rat, is the most reviled creature with the greatest number of enemies, but is time’s most formidable survivor.
“He lives in a country trampled over by a whole herd of sacred cows, all covered by the mighty bull of the NHS. And sacred cows may be milked, but they can’t be slaughtered.”
Gonna need to kill a few sacred cows now to pay for the numbers of NLAW missiles sent to the Ukrainian. $16,000 a single missile not cheap. Replenish stockpiles and all that.
Cheap at the price, if you ask me.
Destroy a $3 million tank with a $16,000 missile. Actually is as good tradeoff.
Exactly.
We’d all be poorer if wealthy people didn’t take every opportunity to avoid paying taxes. This is a basic principle of non-socialist economics.
On the other hand, the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s wife ought not to be a high-caste spiv.
But on the gripping hand, a Labour government would be even worse, so they’ve got us over a barrel.
That’s the real problem, and not only in Britain. One gets the impression that those who would be fit to govern don’t enter politics.