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.

That is pretty much the Sunak defence. It’s like being done for littering, and claiming the problem is that you just couldn’ fit all your £20 notes in your pockets.

The investigation into the matter has now concluded that Sunak has “inadvertently” broken the code of conduct for MPs.

It’s quite technical, all this – and arguably quite tedious. Certainly, Rishi Sunak finds it tedious, as is made clear in his back and forth of letters with the standards commissioner Daniel Greenberg, one of which involves him claiming that he does “not expect to know the details of his family members’ private interests.”

Yes, this really does mean that he, the actual prime minister, doesn’t expect to know where his own wife’s vast fortune is invested, and that this shouldn’t be a problem when it comes to running the country – and the handing out of the enormous contracts that are involved in doing so.

The phrase “private interests” is also a choice one. Sunak’s interest in Koru Kids is not private, in any way shape or form. It’s registered at Companies House and is entirely publicly accessible by anyone who can be bothered to google it, which clearly Sunak can’t, or he would have done, before sending in his extremely sub par response.

It borders, frankly, on the tetchy. Is the prime minister irritated that people would even care about what, to him, may be a piffling amount of money? Surely no one thinks he would actively be influenced enough to change government policy for the kind of money he might spend on a cashmere hoody?

And this, really, is where the problem lies for him. He really does have to persuade people that he’s not too rich to care. But it’s also the most convincing defence he’s got.