Rishi Sunak was wrong to publish his tax returns

He has plenty of money. He earns a substantial amount from his investments. And he gets a City firm to prepare his returns rather than doing them himself at close to midnight after a couple of fines from HMRC like the rest of us. In truth, there were not a lot of surprises when the Prime Minister Rishi Sunak published his tax returns on Wednesday. We didn’t learn anything we didn’t already know. And yet, even if they didn’t provide any ammunition for his opponents to attack him with, it was still a mistake to publish them – because it puts us on a dangerously slippery slope. 

It was perhaps always inevitable that Sunak would give in to pressure to publish his tax returns. He is the richest person to occupy 10 Downing Street in many years, and, in an era that puts little value on privacy, he was always going to have to be open about his wealth.