Rishi Sunak should have sacked Richard Sharp straight away

Now he needs to tighten up the rules on ministerial interests that allowed Boris Johnson to accept help with his personal finances in secret, writes John Rentoul

The current prime minister has started to tighten up the rules on declaring ministerial interests, but not enough

(PA)

The moment Richard Sharp admitted that he had helped Boris Johnson with his personal finances, Rishi Sunak should have sacked him. There was no need to appoint a lawyer to conduct an inquiry, because Sharp, as he now accepts, had broken the rules.

Sharp himself resisted the conclusion, which was that he therefore could not continue as chair of the BBC, until now. I can understand that he needed time to think about it, and that the prime minister is a polite person who believes in due process.

He was polite enough to allow Dominic Raab, his deputy, to pretend that his resignation was his own decision. But that was a case of shades of grey, clarified only by Raab’s unwise commitment in a TV interview that he would resign over anything even off-white.