No, Mr Johnson, you can’t keep families out of the Sunak tax affair

The ministerial code is quite clear, as Sean O’Grady explains

Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak after the chancellor’s mini-budget in March (AFP via Getty)

Thrice-married and twice-divorced, and approximately seven offspring, Boris Johnson is something of an expert on families, and indeed on the arts of electoral politics, if not ethics. His considered view, in the light of the revelations about the non-dom status of Rishi Sunak’s wife, is that “it is very important in politics if you possibly can to try and keep people’s families out of it”.

It’s a typically artful answer. It sounds very reasonable, because at least some spouses, and all children, parents and beyond, never asked their partner to get involved in the rough game of politics. Boris Johnson presumably never incited Stanley Johnson to slap female parliamentary candidates on their bottoms, as he is alleged to have done. One-time Labour home secretary Jacqui Smith was probably as embarrassed as anne else when it emerged that her chap had been watching films on a channel offering titles such as Happy Husbands and Willing Wives, Dirty Debutantes, and Sweaty Sex and claiming the cost back through her official expenses.

Mrs Thatcher was a famously indulgent mother, but can’t have been delighted when Mark found himself accused of involvement in a failed coup in Equatorial Guinea. So it’s understandable that politicians make the plea to “leave the families out of it”.