Anti-tax Tories are circling Rishi - they scent blood

Personnel dramas, infighting and growing fissures caused by the ‘anti-tax loons’ are threatening to de-rail Sunak. Amidst intimidating new statistics from the IMF, can the PM prove his naysayers wrong, asks Anne McElvoy

- Anne McElvoy

RISHI SUNAK gets up very early, even at the week-ends. In good time, then, to receive a ping on his messages on Sunday, alerting him to the arrival of the emergency report he had commissioned from ethics adviser Sir Laurie Magnus into party chairman Nadhim Zahawi’s tangled tax affairs. Sir Laurie found the ministerial code to have been breached no less than seven times while Zahawi’s tax omission was being investigated by HMRC.

Already accused of being slow-footed in dealing with the Tory party’s omni-crises, Sunak this time acted fast — by 8am, Zahawi, who had become Chancellor briefly last summer when Sunak resigned, had been dismissed.

As the PM gets set to mark 100 days in office tomorrow, he is aiming to recast himself as a “sleaze-buster” cleaning house after the sloppiness of the Johnson years and Truss-era disruptions. On Monday the PM insisted that he had “acted pretty decisively”, noting that he could not be held accountable for misconduct under predecessors.

This latest personnel drama, with its overtones of rich-folk arrogance, is far from the end of the dilemmas besetting No 10. Growing splits at senior levels in the party — and among ministers — about tax and economic policy threaten to unbalance the central plank of Sunak’s tenure — namely his reputation as a man who “thinks in spreadsheets” and understands how to improve the economic outlook for Britain and its voters.