Rishi Sunak came to office promising to restore trust to government. After several scandals, he appears unable to escape the chaos that routinely surrounds his party
, Britain’s current prime minister, and Paul Pennyfeather, the hapless protagonist of “Decline and Fall”Pennyfeather is an earnest and unworldly theology student at Oxford, who returns to the fictional setting of Scone College one evening just as the Bollinger Club, an aristocratic drinking society, is embarking on a night of mayhem. Pennyfeather is stripped of his trousers and runs the length of the quadrangle. He is sent down the next day for indecency. From there, things only get worse.
The past few days have underscored this Pennyfeatherish pattern. On January 20th Mr Sunak received a second “fixed penalty notice” from the police, a feat without precedent in high office, for forgetting to wear a seat belt while filming a peppy video clip in his limousine. The first of these small fines came when Mr Sunak was chancellor and attended a birthday gathering for Boris Johnson in Downing Street in violation of covid-19 regulations.
Although Mr Sunak came to office promising to restore trust to government, the prime minister appears unable to escape the Bollingeresque chaos that routinely surrounds his party. The biggest current scandal surrounds Nadhim Zahawi, briefly Mr Sunak’s successor as chancellor, whom he appointed chairman of the Conservative Party.
On January 21st Mr Zahawi, who had a successful career as a businessman before entering Parliament, admitted to having reached a settlement with the authorities over previously unpaid tax. Mr Zahawi said that the tax authority had found him to be “careless and not deliberate”, tax-law terminology that Waugh would have thoroughly enjoyed. Mr Sunak has asked his ethics adviser, Sir Laurie Magnus, to investigate; it is not clear that Mr Sunak has the political capital simply to fire him.
Mr Sunak’s arrival in Downing Street has brought a steadiness to government but it has not precipitated a recovery in Tory polling. The party appears stuck around 20 points behind Labour. Voters do not seem to loathe Mr Sunak; like the character he resembles, there is little to loathe. Yet his inability to bring his party to heel leaves him at risk of appearing weak and, worse, unlucky.
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