Rishi Sunak: citizen of nowhere
The row over his family finances reveals how distant our political class is from ordinary people.
‘How much is a pint of milk?’ This gotcha question for politicians always falls flat – and not just because no one actually buys single pints of milk nowadays. The big reveal – that well-paid but busy people find someone else to queue up at the local Tesco Metro for them – just isn’t that surprising. So last month, when a handful of journalists got overexcited about chancellor Rishi Sunak’s apparent difficulty in using a contactless card-reader to pay for petrol in a post-budget publicity stunt, the rest of us could barely muster a shrug.
Since the budget, news of the Sunak family finances has kept on coming. We now know that the chancellor’s wife, Akshata Murty, is the daughter of an Indian tech billionaire. Her own stake in her father’s company, Infosys, generates millions of pounds each year – making Murty richer than the queen, apparently. We also learned recently that she has ‘non-dom’ status, meaning she has not paid UK tax on income generated abroad. Questions have also been raised about the money Rishi holds in a ‘blind trust’, which is believed to be linked to his time as a hedge-fund manager. None of this is illegal and, it seems, none of it was undeclared.