Sunak’s best defence? He’s too rich to bother breaking the rules

The PM was found to have ‘inadvertently’ breached the ministerial code by failing to declare his shares in his wife’s childcare company. He has the perfect excuse, writes Tom Peck, not that it will help him

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and wife Akshata Murty wave as they board a plane (Stefan Rousseau/PA) (PA Wire)

When Rishi Sunak first became prime minister, it was often discussed whether he was just too unimaginably loaded to do the job. Can you really have, for example, a prime minister who’s richer than the King? It’s not, strictly speaking, a constitutional question, it’s more of a political one.

Do, for example, the millions of voters who can’t afford their energy bills necessarily want to turn on their TVs and listen to the sympathies of a man who apparently had to get the National Grid involved to make sure his brand new indoor swimming pool was hot enough?

What was not foreseen is what appears to have happened: that the prime minister is too minted for the ministerial code. That the Sunaks just have too much money for anyone to possibly expect them to keep track of all of it. And so, when it turns out that he broke the rules by failing to declare a financial interest, via his wife, in the childcare company Koru Kids, we are meant to understand that nothing untoward was intended. It’s just that when you have this much money sloshing around, it’s really hard to keep tabs on it.