HOW quickly political fortunes shift. A few months ago it was Dishy Rishi, as the Chancellor paid (with the taxpayers’ money, of course) the wages of half the country in order for them to stay at home, and then produced cash for them to have a slap-up meal.

But now it is Fishy Rishi, since it was discovered that his wife, Akshata Murty, had non-domiciled tax status in the UK, and then that the Chancellor himself seems to have held on to his US Green Card after becoming an MP, something that may have breached American tax rules.

Naturally, it is easy to be popular when you’re flinging money around as if you were Carrie Johnson in the home furnishings department. Yet one quick way, in politics, to make yourself very unpopular is to be seen as popular. That leads to the conclusion that you could be an electoral threat — and not only to opposing parties.

There was speculation, if not any commensurate evidence, that Mr Sunak’s woes had been welcomed, or even orchestrated, by the Prime Minister.

Boris Johnson may not mind the sheen going off his principal rival for the leadership of the Conservative Party, especially since — to emphasise the rapid ebb and flow of political favour — we were being told that the Prime Minister was a dead duck just a few weeks ago. For now at least, he’s getting better marks from the public and his backbenchers.

But that doesn’t mean he leaked Ms Murty’s tax status to the press (indeed, he says that he didn’t know – though the Chancellor did, apparently, inform the Cabinet Office when he became a minister).

The opposition parties, predictably and reasonably enough, have gone to town, with the usual insinuations that there is something inherently dodgy about non-dom status. The Lib Dems want an inquiry into whether Mr Sunak broke American visa rules.

The latter of those strikes me as a bit desperate; the Chancellor lived for years in the States and, if anything, probably suffered financially by having a Green Card. His account is that he sought advice on his first visit as a minister and, having been told it would be best to surrender his visa, promptly did so. As smoking guns go, that seems pretty small-calibre.

Nor is there any suggestion that his wife did anything illegal or even very unusual. The purpose of non-dom status is to avoid getting taxed twice over on the same income; she paid tax on all the money she earned in the UK, and as far as we know, on the money she earned overseas, to the relevant authorities there.

There are instances where non-dom status is clearly being used as a highly fanciful loophole, but this doesn’t seem to be one of them.

Where it is trickier is that it implies that Ms Murty did not plan (or at least until the other day, when she volunteered to pay all her tax here) to stay in the UK long-term, and that might also be the objection raised to the period that Mr Sunak hung on to his US visa status.

And this goes hand in hand with the quite widespread view that the couple, who are both very rich, are members of the cosmopolitan elite, without much commitment to this country.

My instinct is to think this is unfair; why shouldn’t Ms Murty hang on to her Indian citizenship, even if she’s married to a leading politician? And the fact that Mr Sunak is happy to work in public service, rather than earn more squillions of pounds in finance or, indeed, lie on a beach somewhere, ought, if anything, to be a recommendation.

But it’s very easy to paint the very rich as very out-of-touch, not least because it’s a charge that is bound to have at least a little truth in it.

Unlike his wife, the Chancellor didn’t have billionaire parents, and he made his own fortune with Goldman Sachs and hedge funds, but it’s been quite a long time since he will have had to worry about the gas bill, the cost of filling up his car, or the rising prices in the supermarkets.

His problem is that the rest of the country, including plenty of what — at least until recently — were moderately affluent members of the middle classes, is currently thinking about little else.

And they are unconvinced that the best method of improving their circumstances are a 10 per cent tax rise (in the form of the National Insurance changes) and a huge effective cut in benefits, rising at about three per cent, while cost-of-living inflation is more like eight per cent.

The electorate’s verdict on Mr Sunak, particularly after the Spring Statement – which, despite some concessions on allowances, isn’t going to do much to alleviate the pain of the cost of living crunch – isn’t great.

In April 2020, the Chancellor’s net approval rating in YouGov polling was in the high 40s; it’s now minus 29. If anything suggests the public think you’re out of touch, it is numbers like that.

But though money tends to insulate you from the sound of the howls of anguish from those who are getting squeezed, it can’t be the whole story in Mr Sunak’s case. He seems to be fairly tin-eared on the whole business of being a politician.

He should have known, for example, that his wife’s position would look politically bad, no matter how proper it was in legal terms, and that he should have got ahead of the problem. The fact that she has made a U-turn to save him won’t get any credit. The damage is done.

This wasn’t apparent while the money was flowing freely, but the real test of political acumen is adversity. Mr Johnson, whatever your opinion of him, is quite clearly an escape artist, at least sometimes a vote-getter, and someone determined to gain and hold on to office. You don’t become Mayor of London, twice, as a Tory without fairly considerable political charisma and savvy, let alone deliver a majority of 80-odd seats at a general election.

If Mr Sunak has essentially wrecked his chances of challenging and succeeding Mr Johnson, and soon gets replaced — all of which looks probable right now — it’s only too easy to imagine him chucking the whole business and going off to run Google or something.

And that’s the problem. Whereas Mr Johnson, like his predecessors in the job, is acutely aware that a popular Chancellor is the most immediate threat to a Prime Minister. But Mr Johnson has street-fighting instincts, an understanding of public opinion and political antennae; Mr Sunak hasn’t shown much sign of any of those yet.

Perhaps this will be the making of him, but that would be a really impressive political turn-around.

 

* Our columns are a platform for writers to express their opinions. They do not necessarily represent the views of The Herald.