Prime ministers do not need ethics advisers. They need theatre producers. The outgoing Conservative party chair, Nadhim Zahawi, was an able, popular politician and briefly successful minister. He did not break any law, filch PPE cash from the state, appoint a friend to public office, hug an aide or attend an illegal gathering. Like thousands of taxpayers he admits to making a “careless” error in his tax affairs. Like thousands, he found himself penalised. He failed to mention it when offered a ministerial job. He paid a high price.
Cut to the prime minister. On Rishi Sunak’s arrival last year, Downing Street was compared to a sewer blocked by a fatberg of sleaze, corruption and incompetence. His job was to clean it. Boris Johnson and Liz Truss had emptied the cabinet of virtually all experience and ability. Former ministers littered the drains. An ex-prime minister faced an inquiry into lockdown law-breaking. Question marks hovered over Dominic Raab, Suella Braverman and who else?
As for Sunak, he was as near-saintly as could be. He coated the doors of No 10 with “integrity, professionalism and accountability”, and went to work on inflation and growth. The trouble was that Westminster was still enthralled by the toxicity of Johnson-Truss. When reports began to emerge of Zahawi’s tax difficulties last autumn, Sunak’s heart must have sunk. But an ethics adviser was not yet in place, nor does Downing Street any longer boast the handful of greybeard aides who always knew trouble before it broke and could whisper in the prime ministerial ear.
Sunak’s office is filled only with eager young loyalists, as politically inexperienced as the prime minister and obsessed with publicity more than policy. He is always on the road in search of a photographer. When Zahawi settled his taxes all seemed well. When the heat grew a month ago, Sunak felt, still not unreasonably, that Zahawi deserved a fair if swift hearing. It took the ethics adviser, Laurie Magnus, just a week to condemn him, and Sunak less than two hours to sack him.
As the frenzy passed, Westminster staged what it loves best, a full-throated, blood-spurting Wagnerian epilogue. If Zahawi had gone, Sunak must be blamed, somehow. He should not have appointed Zahawi last autumn, or he should have sacked him at the first Guardian headline. When he did put Zahawi on trial, he was accused of doing it too late – or perhaps too soon for him properly to defend himself. Anyway Sunak was weak, naive, too loyal to friends, and not up to scratch. Keir Starmer reached a new low in implying Sunak was also too small for the job.
There is not a democracy in the world where Zahawi’s failings and Sunak’s handling of them would have merited such a ballyhoo. Of course non-disclosure mattered, but mattered how much? The theatre of Westminster politics has distanced itself ever further from the serious business of government. Its appetite for heroes and villains has become insatiable. Forget inflation and growth, health and education. The next great dramas are Raab and Johnson.
Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist
