‘To suffer one scandal,’ as Oscar Wilde didn’t quite write, ‘may be regarded as a misfortune. But to suffer three at once looks like carelessness.’
‘Careless’ is indeed the very word used by Tory party chairman Nadim Zahawi to describe his handling of his own tax affairs – just one of several potential scandalettes gathering around the government like flies around a carcass.
The revelations about Zahawi’s tax arrangements and Johnson’s financial difficulties come hard on the heels of another moment of ‘carelessness’
The claim by the Sunday Times that BBC chairman Richard Sharp helped cash-strapped then Prime Minister Boris Johnson arrange a loan in 2020 before Mr Sharp got the job is another apparently minor matter that Labour has leapt on and bigged up in its efforts to brand the government as inherently corrupt as well as incompetent.
The revelations about Zahawi’s tax arrangements and Johnson’s financial difficulties come hard on the heels of another moment of ‘carelessness’ – Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s failure to don a safety belt while making a video from the back seat of a car – an offence for which the PM has received a fixed penalty fine from Lancashire Police.
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