In the past few minutes, Lancashire Police has confirmed that Rishi Sunak has received a fixed penalty notice for sitting in a moving car without wearing a seatbelt. The Prime Minister filmed a video while touring the north west on Thursday which showed he had taken his seatbelt off, and a statement from the constabulary this evening said:
You will be aware that a video has been circulating on social media showing an individual failing to wear a seatbelt while a passenger in a moving car in Lancashire.
After looking into this matter, we have today (Friday, January 20th) issued a 42-year-old man from London with a conditional offer of fixed penalty.
This means Sunak has now received two police fines while in office, but thanks to his former boss Boris Johnson, who was fined for the same lockdown-busting birthday celebration as Sunak, he won’t be the first Prime Minister to be penalised for lawbreaking while in office. The public reaction to the lockdown breaches was much more visceral than it will be for a seatbelt offence, given the sacrifices people made in the early days of the pandemic. Both Sunak and Johnson were lucky at the time that the fine they were issued with was for a breach in which they were, as one of Johnson’s allies put it, ‘ambushed by cake’ rather than a debauched party. Mind you, Sunak was lucky in many ways that he was fined back then, as it might have been tempting otherwise for him to call for Johnson to resign over his FPN – and then today’s fine would have been rather more consequential.
Sunak comes across as warm and spontaneous and interesting when he’s in groups of people or at the ‘PM connect’ sessions he has started doing recently. But in his slick videos, he doesn’t appear fully real, as though another way of saving time along with getting jets around the north of England is to deploy an AI Prime Minister to do the recordings instead.
Tory MPs were pretty miffed by his relaxed approach to the ‘PM connect’ forum, given it led to him suggesting that people who want tax cuts now are ‘idiots’. Appearing dismissive of a wing of the Conservative party, always a sensitive beast, will probably be more damaging than being fined for a motoring offence.
A No. 10 spokesman said that Sunak accepts his mistake and has apologised, and that he will comply with the fixed penalty.
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