We are governed by a cabinet of wealthy nomads, loosely rooted in British society

The Tory death wish intransigently persists, defying all attempts to repress it: the lemmings are stampeding towards the cliff edge and no one can stop them, because that is what their nature blindly impels them to do. 

The news that both the Prime Minister and the Chancellor are being served fixed penalty notices for breaching the rigorous Covid restrictions they themselves devised was accompanied by a descant of further scandal as the Conservative MP Imran Ahmad Khan was convicted of sexual assault on a 15-year-old boy, the situation being further aggravated by an extraordinary public defence of Khan by Crispin Blunt.

After the sobering news reports we have seen from Mariupol and other stricken Ukrainian cities, it beggars belief that a British prime minister who has established a strong rapport with the Ukrainian government and taken a leading role in helping it resist Russian aggression should be expected to resign, leaving his task unfinished, because he sat for an hour in the Cabinet Room celebrating his birthday on his wife’s initiative. One can imagine the laughter in the Kremlin, if so effective an opponent were removed on such trivial, priggish grounds in the midst of a European war.

At the same time, his presumed successor Rishi Sunak has been neutralised by a similar fine, effectively removing him from any chance of the succession. This follows upon serious questions regarding Sunak’s possession of a US green card, while Chancellor of the Exchequer, and related issues of national identity which have opened a can of worms much more serious than fixed penalty fines.

There are Conservative backbenchers who, at least until the fixed penalty fine came into the public domain, claimed that l’affaire Sunak was a hiccup, a temporary embarrassment that would go away once the legality of the Chancellor’s tax affairs was exhaustively demonstrated and the media turned their attention to other matters. The worrying thing is that some of them actually believed that.

They simply do not understand; they are political practitioners who neither comprehend politics nor the thinking of the British public. How could they, when they live in a Westminster bubble, on whose received opinions the transient experience of conducting constituency surgeries can make few inroads? The Sunak controversy was never about legality: few observers believed the chancellor had broken the law. But the political class has failed to appreciate the impression being made on the public as a result of the Cabinet’s membership being placed under unprecedented scrutiny.

The Prime Minister, throughout both his terms as London mayor, was an American citizen. He only relinquished his US passport in 2016, as a born-again Brexiteer pursuing the Conservative leadership. Rishi Sunak, while presiding over Britain’s finances, held a US green card, classifying him as a “permanent US resident”, as did his wife. Sunak’s predecessor as chancellor and now Health Secretary, Sajid Javid, has hastily volunteered the information that he was not domiciled in Britain for tax purposes between 2000 and 2006, when he worked for Deutsche Bank.

So much for Brexit Britain, the patriotic island nation, taking its place once again in the world as a distinctive force. Brexit was a major repudiation of globalism and a reassertion of national identity, or so we were led to believe. The reality is that we are governed by a Cabinet dominated by plutocrats, some of them only very loosely rooted in British society. Rishi Sunak refers to California as “home”, he owns an apartment in Santa Monica worth £5.5m and his retention of his green card into his period as chancellor signals his intention to work in America if, as now seems more than likely, he fails to become prime minister. In bald terms, from 2015 to 2021 his Yorkshire constituency of Richmond was represented by a permanent American resident.

The scrutiny that the Sunak controversy has provoked has revealed the startling fact that almost one-third of Cabinet members – seven out of 23 – do not have British-born fathers and two of them were not themselves born here. The positions that they hold are among the most senior: deputy prime minister, chancellor, home secretary, health secretary, education secretary, business secretary and minister of state at the cabinet office. The disingenuous way to spin this would be to portray it as an inspirational narrative of poor immigrants working hard and rising to the upper echelons of British society – the Ugandan Asians were an iconic example – but that is not what we are looking at here.

Poor immigrants? Boris Johnson’s great-grandfather was Minister of the Interior under Sultan Mehmed VI of the Ottoman Empire. Rishi Sunak’s father was a doctor and he was educated at Winchester; the last three generations of his family have resided on three different continents – four, if his American residency is included. Is there anything reprehensible about that? Absolutely not: it reflects the kind of mobility and pursuit of opportunity that is intrinsic to wealth-creating capitalism. But – and this is the crucial point – it is wholly inappropriate to a career in politics.

Serving at any level in the British Parliament, from MP to cabinet minister, requires an absolute commitment to this country, to be embedded culturally within the British community and to understand and reflect its feelings. Many commentators have bemoaned the “disconnect” between politicians and the public. In the case of the Conservative Party it is hardly to be wondered at, when senior cabinet ministers hold foreign citizenship or domicile and their careers are a globalised progression from banks to hedge funds, with a temporary sojourn in politics to improve the CV.

The whole trajectory of a political career in this country has been reversed. In former generations, an aspiring politician would spend his early years amassing sufficient money to support a political career, before devoting the remainder of his life to politics. Today, holding high office is regarded, with a characteristic sense of entitlement, as a useful additional credential for advancement to a massively remunerative position with a bank or hedge fund. The service of the British people is little more than an apprenticeship for plutocracy. The Sunak case epitomises that trend.

While no free marketeer can honestly deplore the creation and investment of wealth, provided the law is diligently observed, the political situation is something completely different. Envy is an inevitable failing of the human character but, by and large, the British public is not hostile to great wealth, if it is honestly come by. In particular, there is universal tolerance of the large fortunes of professional footballers, popular musicians and celebrities, since the public acknowledges that they have furnished it with entertainment.

The problem arises when very rich politicians exercise fiscal power in a way that damages the interests of people much poorer than themselves. Sunak’s increase in National Insurance contributions is a classic instance. Leftist politicians have, for years, cried wolf about poverty in this country. Now, however, there really are desperate people forced to choose between eating adequately and heating their homes. To see their misery compounded by a man whose family wealth has been exposed as eye-wateringly prodigious can only be a provocation.

That is something the Tories have developed into a science: provoking the electorate. When people look at their Draconian energy bills, they remember Boris posturing at COP26 and every other forum of the climate cult, a bourgeois liberal obsession now seriously oppressing millions of people in Britain. Everything that is done and said by this Government and its associated party screams alienation to Red Wall voters. Even this week’s political sideshow, with a Tory MP convicted of a sexual assault on a minor and Crispin Blunt, a former justice minister, condemning his conviction as based on “lazy tropes about LGBT+ people”, exuded toxic entitlement.

What on earth, Red Wall voters must have been asking themselves, does he mean? That it is unacceptable to bring such people to justice? Unfortunately for the Government, this followed the revelation that £650,000 of taxpayers’ money had been wasted on a “Safe to be Me” conference, cancelled under pressure from Stonewall and other groups because the Government refused to ban therapy for sexually confused people. In the current economic climate, why was the Government spending so much money on such an exercise?

A Government that pays lip service to “inclusion” is actually highly exclusive. It is the domain of plutocrats and lobby groups serving minority interests, but exercising high levels of influence. There were millionaires in Victorian cabinets, but since their wealth was mainly based on land, they were very firmly rooted in this country. As the Sunak case demonstrates, the current crop of rich politicians are a very different proposition. They are wealthy nomads, moving from hedge fund to hedge fund, and country to country.

The abuse is magnified by the expectation among the public that Brexit would usher in a period of renewed British identity and solidarity, with globalisation, further exposed by the pandemic as a huge vulnerability, especially to supply chains, finally repudiated. Instead, the British public finds itself governed by a set of here-today-gone-tomorrow financial itinerants, with no intuitive understanding of this country. If Tory ministers had worn sandwich boards pleading “Please vote us out of power”, they could not have got their message across any more effectively.

As it is, that message has been received loud and clear. In 2019, the Conservative Party had one of the most seismic opportunities to become the natural party of government for a generation, but it has recklessly dissipated that golden opportunity, so that defeat and dissolution beckon.