Sunak to hold Q&A in north-east as Labour says ‘many questions unanswered’ over firing of Tory party chair
Yesterday Steve Brine, the Conservative chair of the Commons health committee, said the Nadhim Zahawi affair showed how the Tories were suffering from “long Boris” because this, and other, scandals originated in events that happened during Boris Johnson’s premiership. It is a terrific phrase, and a variation on the “long Johnson” version used by my colleague Rafael Behr in a column last week (which itself may have been inspired by Robert Shrimsley’s “long populism” column in the Financial Times earlier this month).
George Osborne, the Tory former chancellor, made the same point on the Andrew Neil Show last night. He said:
The big question for the Rishi Sunak premiership was whether his high ratings could pull the Tory party up, or the Tory party’s low ratings would pull him down.
And at the moment he is being pulled down by a series of scandals which do not directly involve him, are hangovers, if you like, of the Johnson era.
I was the photocopy boy in Downing Street back in the ’90s when John Major had all these problems. And there are similarities in that John Major was likeable, conscientious, like Rishi Sunak, but ultimately, was not able to escape the downward pull of the Tory party. It’s still ‘we’ll see’ with Rishi Sunak, but he knows that as each week passes, as each new scandal unfolds, the window for action gets smaller and smaller.
To my mind, the defining thing of his political career was his decision to resign as chancellor from the Boris Johnson government over sleaze, over integrity, but he’s never really talked about that.
And we got the very first hint of it at prime minister’s questions this week where he started to say, ‘I resigned from the Johnson government’. I think you’re going to hear a lot more of that. I think he’ll have learned lessons even from the Zahawi affair, that you need to act more quickly than he did – and I think that he’s going to try and define himself now as ‘the sleaze buster’, but it’s extremely hard.
Sunak joined the health secretary, Steve Barclay, and the NHS chief executive, Amanda Pritchard, on a visit to the University Hospital of North Tees in Stockton, Teesside.
They visited the hospital’s integrated coordination centre, a hub which manages patients coming in and out of the hospital and links up with community teams to help them be discharged, freeing beds.
Continue reading…Sunak to hold Q&A in north-east as Labour says ‘many questions unanswered’ over firing of Tory party chairYesterday Steve Brine, the Conservative chair of the Commons health committee, said the Nadhim Zahawi affair showed how the Tories were suffering from “long Boris” because this, and other, scandals originated in events that happened during Boris Johnson’s premiership. It is a terrific phrase, and a variation on the “long Johnson” version used by my colleague Rafael Behr in a column last week (which itself may have been inspired by Robert Shrimsley’s “long populism” column in the Financial Times earlier this month).George Osborne, the Tory former chancellor, made the same point on the Andrew Neil Show last night. He said:The big question for the Rishi Sunak premiership was whether his high ratings could pull the Tory party up, or the Tory party’s low ratings would pull him down. And at the moment he is being pulled down by a series of scandals which do not directly involve him, are hangovers, if you like, of the Johnson era. I was the photocopy boy in Downing Street back in the ’90s when John Major had all these problems. And there are similarities in that John Major was likeable, conscientious, like Rishi Sunak, but ultimately, was not able to escape the downward pull of the Tory party. It’s still ‘we’ll see’ with Rishi Sunak, but he knows that as each week passes, as each new scandal unfolds, the window for action gets smaller and smaller.To my mind, the defining thing of his political career was his decision to resign as chancellor from the Boris Johnson government over sleaze, over integrity, but he’s never really talked about that. And we got the very first hint of it at prime minister’s questions this week where he started to say, ‘I resigned from the Johnson government’. I think you’re going to hear a lot more of that. I think he’ll have learned lessons even from the Zahawi affair, that you need to act more quickly than he did – and I think that he’s going to try and define himself now as ‘the sleaze buster’, but it’s extremely hard.Sunak joined the health secretary, Steve Barclay, and the NHS chief executive, Amanda Pritchard, on a visit to the University Hospital of North Tees in Stockton, Teesside.They visited the hospital’s integrated coordination centre, a hub which manages patients coming in and out of the hospital and links up with community teams to help them be discharged, freeing beds. Continue reading…