‘To suffer one scandal,’ as Oscar Wilde didn’t quite write, ‘may be regarded as a misfortune. But to suffer three at once looks like carelessness.’
‘Careless’ is indeed the very word used by Tory party chairman Nadim Zahawi to describe his handling of his own tax affairs – just one of several potential scandalettes gathering around the government like flies around a carcass.
The revelations about Zahawi’s tax arrangements and Johnson’s financial difficulties come hard on the heels of another moment of ‘carelessness’
The claim by the Sunday Times that BBC chairman Richard Sharp helped cash-strapped then Prime Minister Boris Johnson arrange a loan in 2020 before Mr Sharp got the job is another apparently minor matter that Labour has leapt on and bigged up in its efforts to brand the government as inherently corrupt as well as incompetent.
The revelations about Zahawi’s tax arrangements and Johnson’s financial difficulties come hard on the heels of another moment of ‘carelessness’ – Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s failure to don a safety belt while making a video from the back seat of a car – an offence for which the PM has received a fixed penalty fine from Lancashire Police.
The three cases inevitably remind us of the dying days of John Major’s doomed administration before Tony Blair’s new Labour election landslide in the late 1990s when hardly a week went by without some hapless Tory Minister or MP being caught out in an embarrassing or ridiculous situation at the very moment when Major was advocating a ‘back to basics’ return to rigorous moral and ethical standards.
By themselves this trio of current mishaps can be regarded as trivial, but taken together they give out the distinct whiff of a government in decay which has lost control of the narrative and can do little or nothing to prevent itself from spiralling helplessly down towards defeat at the next election.
This is a recurrent pattern in the history of long term Tory governments which have been in power for too long. Harold Macmillan’s government of the early 1960s was beset by a series of sex and security scandals culminating in the Profumo affair of 1963 in which War Minister John Profumo was found to have enjoyed the favours of showgirl Christine Keeler who was simultaneously seeing a Soviet Naval attaché at the height of the Cold War.
Labour leader Harold Wilson skilfully used the scandals to suggest that the Tories were riddled with decadence and sleaze and that ‘13 years of Tory misrule’ were more than enough. He was duly rewarded with a general election victory in 1964. If Sir Keir Starmer brushes up on his political history he will duly take note.
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