17 May 2024 , 12:33
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It must be difficult being Rishi Sunak.
On the one hand you're a more decent soul than the last two Prime Ministers, you're paying more tax than the public sector gives you in wages, and you're trying to warn people that a catastrophic collapse in the world order is on the cards.
On the other people call you uncaring, it turns out you made £14,000 an hour last year and hadn't noticed, and Esther McVey steals your thunder with a speech about rainbow lanyards which makes your whole government look barking.
Now you're facing electoral annihilation for doing what, in your head, is absolutely the right and reasonable thing. Such a man, facing such confusing obstacles, would be forgiven for saying 'sod this for a laugh' and throwing in the towel, hopping in a helicopter and getting the hell out.
'Escape? I've never needed one before' (POOL/AFP via Getty Images)But Sunak doesn't make calculations using the same parameters as the rest of us. Because he is so determined to do what he and nobody else thinks is right, he is delaying a general election, and has vowed to stick around even if he loses, because he so loves doing a job with a basic salary of a mere £250 a day.
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This is, to him, a sacrifice. To us, it'd be a very comfortable living thank you very much, especially as the entry qualifications appear to include ego, a big mouth, and the same sense of entitlement as a particularly sociopathic cat.
On Planet Sunak, sticking around as a backbench MP for just a single day would earn him enough money to pay for just one of his favourite £490 Prada shoes. In a week, he'd earn enough to buy 3 pairs. Over a year, 186 pairs. Meanwhile the average nurse, on £37,000 a year and happy with a pair of £30 crocs, would earn more than 6 times as many shoes as him - 1,233.
This is the kind of maths that enables Sunak to genuinely claim that nurses are doing pretty well. The fact that his shoes are 16 times more than a nurse's, or that a nurse drives an old VW Polo with astronomical parking fees and car insurance, while he doesn't know where the petrol cap is and uses a helicopter to pop to the coast, is not part of his computations. The maths is entirely different, for him.
They generally use commas rather than decimal points, for example (PA)There's nothing wrong with being wealthy. There's nothing wrong with having a mission to help others. But when the effects of one has consequences for the other, it's time to ask yourself if devotion to public service is really your forte.
You see, as a former Goldman Sachs banker with investments in the Cayman Islands, Sunak is stinking rich. His tax declaration shows he made £5million in four years from investments alone, which at £3,424 a day is a nice return from what is basically gambling. It's enough to divorce him a little from the hard realities of life - from worries about school, health, aging parents, sick children, or job cuts.
But while his personal wealth gives him an income nearly 37 times that of the average UK salary, he has married the daughter of a businessman whose wealth is so vast it's like Elon Musk being father-in-law to someone with only one shoe.
Sunak's wife Akshata Murty has only 1% of shares in her father's company - yet last year they rose in value by £122million, a hundred times what the PM gets from his personal investments, and 1,336 times his basic salary as an MP. To put this in terms even a Sunak could understand, she could afford to buy him 248,979 of his favourite loafers without dipping into capital reserves. Or, if she was feeling generous, buy 4million pairs for plebs.
To Sunak, a man whose salary covers only a third of his personal tax bill, taxes are too high. To the general population who are tired of potholes and queues, public services need more money. To Sunak, who was worth £750m in the 2022 Sunday Times Rich List, then lost £201m in 2023 and has now put £122m back on again, Britain's economy has turned a corner. To anyone else who lost a third of their net worth two years ago, they're still in deep in the hole.
No-one in their right mind would be envious of Sunak's wealth, because it is the source of all his problems. He has so much that he doesn't notice losing vast chunks of it, and no matter how much he is compelled to pay in tax he'll never personally see the benefits of it in public services he doesn't patronise. If the worst happened and his wife or her money ran out, he'd have to cut it down to one helicopter ride a week.
None of it was earned. His personal wealth has been heaped up in a pile so big that it now grows its own money without anyone lifting a finger. He could turn it all into coins and use it to fill sinkholes, and it would still multiply by increasing the value of the land above it. His wife's wealth could be fired into space and it still wouldn't disappear. It would coalesce into a new and very shiny moon, glittering up there with our best interests at heart while totally cocking up the tides, our climate and our menstrual cycles.
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Everything Sunak has gained or done well at was a result of him doing absolutely nothing. The immense wealth which cushions his family blinds him to the hazards everyone else experiences, and which he's supposedly in politics to help with. Meanwhile everything he takes an active role in fails miserably - Eat Out To Help Out, stopping the small boats, the cost of living crisis. He is the anti-Midas: everything he touches turns to s***.
To us, the logic is plain. Stop making things worse, enjoy your money, let someone else have a go at things you can't understand. But for Sunak there is a different calculation: he's not trying to avoid humiliation, because he doesn't know what it is. He's not working out the best way to lose, because he never has. Things will always turn out fine if you can make £122m by doing nothing, and it always will, and that's the sort of mindless optimism which will always trash the things your money can't buy, like ideologies, elections, and countries.
But you can bet your bottom dollar that whatever he says, when Sunak finally does experience defeat, he'll be out of here quicker than a nurse's pay cheque on rent day. And he can take his shoes with him.