Here’s a sum for maths-loving Sunak: how many times has he been investigated?

The standards commissioner is now looking into the prime minister, which is a sentence that political columnists can go entire careers without ever having to write, yet which now seems to fly out of my fingers with a terrifying familiarity

Three months after his first speech about how much he likes maths, Rishi Sunak has given another speech about how much he likes maths. One speech plus another speech equals two speeches.

All of the other numbers, however, appear to be a bit too complicated for him.

Three months on, and he’s still sticking to his very firmly held belief that Britain needs to change its ways, and make all schoolchildren study maths up until the age of 18. The UK doesn’t take maths seriously enough, he explained, and while he did so, Sky News cut him off in preference for a pre-recorded feature on World Malbec Day.

When he first came out with this stuff three months ago, he must have been delighted with the response, which was to be given a very large amount of fiendishly difficult maths homework. Like, for example, if you’re already thousands short on maths teachers, and the ones you have got are either striking for better pay or leaving the profession altogether, how exactly are you going to start teaching more maths?

And this is where the real mystery starts, as Rishi Sunak – supposed maths lover – has had this little equation to try and balance for three full months; and yet here he was, handing in the same homework again, short of any evidence that he’d even looked at it.

What he did have was the same handful of cliches as last time, about how important maths is. Just as important as reading. About how hard it is to get on in life without a basic grasp of numeracy.

But is that really true? Sunak, after all, has made it all the way to 10 Downing Street and here are just a handful of maths problems that are self-evidently too difficult for him: how are you going to fit 45,000 asylum seekers into 200 hotel rooms in Rwanda?

Actually, that one is quite easy. You can fit an infinite number of asylum seekers into 200 hotel rooms in Rwanda, because it’s illegal to send them there in the first place.

Here’s another one: how are you going to pay for 30 hours of free childcare for one- and two-year-olds without massively expanding the number of places available in a sector that already can’t recruit enough staff, mainly because of the end of free movement after Brexit?

Actually, that’s also a fairly easy one. You don’t need to worry about how you do that one, you just taper the introduction of the free hours so that nothing happens until after the election, when you can either scrap it or just make it Labour’s problem.

And here’s a really easy one that he’s also got hopelessly wrong: if you announce in the budget that you’re going to pay childminders a £600 signing-on fee, or £1,200 if they work for an agency “like Koru Kids” (ie you actually mention Koru Kids, by name, on the government’s own website), and then it turns out your wife is a shareholder in Koru Kids and you stand to benefit, should you have declared that interest?

The answer to that one, is a very clear “yes”. Which is why the parliamentary standards commissioner is now investigating the prime minister, which is itself a sentence that political columnists can go entire careers without ever having to write, yet which now seems to fly out of my fingers with a terrifying familiarity.

What the standards commissioner is going to have to find out is whether Rishi Sunak thought the answer was “no” or “I don’t know”, neither of which are likely to score him very highly when the results come back.

Sunak’s spokesperson has said he will be “very happy to assist” the standards commissioner over the matter, which is very magnanimous of him. But you’d think this wasn’t quite the assistance the standards commissioner was hoping for.

After the Johnson years, you’d have to think the assistance they might have imagined they’d be getting was a bit of a lie down; that their days of investigating the prime minister over breaches of standards would possibly be over. And yet here they are, having to do it all over again.

(The same, of course, goes for the police, who not that long ago had to hand Rishi Sunak his second fixed penalty notice in almost as many months).

The ideal “assistance” they would have wanted would have been for the prime minister to perhaps not give both a massive profit and publicity boost to a childminding agency from which his wife and therefore he materially benefits, and not consider whether they might be something he would have to declare.

But who knows? Maybe that’s the point. He wants everyone to carry on doing maths, but hasn’t actually allocated any resources to make it happen; so could this be the alternative plan?

The standards commissioner, Daniel Greenberg, is 58, and he’s not going to be given the chance to give up maths. He’s going to have to work out how much money the Sunaks stand to make from Rishi’s own policies, and then decide how likely it was that he hadn’t worked out that he should obviously have told him about it. That’s both arithmetic and probability there.

As for the rest of us, we’re still stuck with the same basic-level stuff. Like, for example, if I earn this much every month, and the basic goods and services I require cost this much, how am I not going to die in poverty?

Sunak, of course, stopped doing these kinds of sums quite a long time ago. Numeracy, like any skill, has to be practised regularly or it dwindles. Perhaps that explains it.