What controversies has Rishi Sunak been involved in?

New PM not immune to scrapes with notoriety during time in government

Rishi Sunak is Britain’s new prime minister after securing the support of the vast majority of the Conservative parliamentary party and seeing off a challenge from Penny Mordaunt.

Sir Graham Brady, chairman of the 1922 Committee, made the announcement on Monday afternoon, moments after Ms Mordaunt had withdrawn and a matter of hours after Boris Johnson had drawn a line under his comeback bid, for which he returned early from a luxury holiday in the Caribbean.

Mr Sunak, the UK’s first British Asian PM and our youngest since 1812, has since wasted little time in warning his MPs they face an “existential threat” and will be wiped out at the next election if they do not win back public trust following the scandal-ridden reign of Mr Johnson and the economic maelstrom that was the disastrous six-week premiership of Liz Truss.

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Mr Sunak will be a familiar face to most after serving as Mr Johnson’s chancellor throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, when he led the £69bn furlough scheme to keep people in work and the Eat Out to Help Out campaign to encourage economic growth and from his ultimately unsuccessful run to stop Ms Truss becoming PM earlier this summer.

He has also been caught up in a number of controversies during his tenure as chancellor, of which a brief summary follows.

Tax scandal

Mr Sunak has long faced scepticism over his considerable personal wealth, with fashion columnists picking up on his expensive jackets, watches and trainers.

That came to a head in April this year, when the then-chancellor and his wife, Indian tech heiress Akshata Murthy, raised eyebrows by making a £100,000 donation to Winchester College, his old alma mater.

The Independent’s subsequent story that Ms Murty, believed to hold a £690m stake in her father’s giant IT services company Infosys, had saved millions of pounds in tax on her earnings thanks to her non-dom status also harmed his reputation.

It was an entirely legal strategy but not a good look in such a dire fiscal climate.

Mr Sunak insisted that his wife had done nothing wrong before she let it be known on 8 April that she would now arrange matters to ensure she would pay UK tax after all.

Green card

A further story about Mr Sunak still holding a US green card – the family have a second home in sunny California – while working for the British government, provoked further demands from Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer that he “come clean” about his personal affairs.

The strain beginning to show, the chancellor complained in an interview with The Sun that he believed the opposition was responsible for the leaks against his wife (the party suggested he “look a little closer to home”) and moved his family out of Downing Street.

He wrote to Mr Johnson referring himself to Lord Geidt, then the independent adviser on ministers’ interests, asking for an investigation to be carried out into his private finances in order to establish that he was guilty of no wrongdoing.

Partygate

As Mr Johnson came under immense pressure to resign after it emerged that his own social distancing rules had been widely ignored within Downing Street and a series of staff parties held at the height of the pandemic – a lurid saga of wine fridges, Christmas quizzes and vomit-splattered walls – Mr Sunak shrewdly kept his distance.

Mr Johnson struck an increasingly desperate and discredited figure in January as Whitehall mandarin Sue Gray gathered what looked like damning evidence against him and turned much of it over to London’s Metropolitan Police, compelling officers to launch an investigation of their own, as seething backbenchers handed in their letters of no confidence to Sir Graham’s committee in droves.

Mr Sunak remained untainted until he was eventually forced to concede that he himself had attended a Cabinet Room birthday bash for Mr Johnson, for which he received a £50 fixed-penalty notice from the Met Police on 12 April alongside the then-PM and the latter’s wife, Carrie Johnson.

He paid it immediately and apologised by saying: “I can appreciate people’s frustration. And I think it’s now the job of all of us in government and all politicians to restore people’s trust.”

Spring Statement

While Mr Johnson attempted to rehabilitate his reputation by loudly cheerleading the Ukrainian defensive effort following Russia’s military invasion on 24 February, Mr Sunak was left languishing at home and forced to deliver relentless bad news about a worsening cost of living crisis, which has since seen inflation climb to a 40-year high and household energy bills rocket.

His widely unpopular Spring Statement on 23 March saw him fail to add to the £350-a-year aid package he had already announced to help families tackle the booming cost of heating their homes and fail to ditch an imminent rise in National Insurance.

Rishi Sunak and Boris Johnson (AP)

Despite a crowd-pleasing cut in fuel duty, a YouGov poll concluded that 69 per cent of Britons believed the chancellor had not done enough to help working people out of financial hardship.

The days that followed saw Mr Sunak face media scrutiny the likes of which he had never previously known, resulting in a succession of gaffes that exposed his apparent inexperience and naivety.

He tried in vain to defend the proposition that he, of all people, was telling low-income families they would simply have to tighten their belts and go without.

A phone-in on LBC landed him in an uncomfortable encounter with a single mother who said she was unable to keep her radiators on and worried for her children.

A question about the price of bread in an interview with the BBC drew the response, “We have all different breads in my house”, and a publicity stunt at a Sainsbury’s petrol station saw him forced to borrow a staff member’s Kia Rio and struggle to pay at the till with his contactless card, as though he had never before had to buy a can of Coke and a Twirl in his life.

Resignation resentment

Before he effectively found himself the post-Truss “unity candidate” by default on 24 October, Mr Sunak was widely believed to be loathed by many Tories who had not forgiven him for “turning” on Mr Johnson, he and health secretary Sajid Javid having resigned in early July over the Chris Pincher scandal, which sparked the deluge that eventually led to the departures of almost 60 MPs and staffers that forced the PM out of office.

That sentiment is thought to have been behind his defeat to Ms Truss at the hands of the party membership this summer.

But his doom-laden prophecies about her fanciful economic policies as a leadership candidate having since been more than borne out by nightmarish reality, Mr Sunak has won his fellow MPs around and secured the keys to No 10.