Millionaires Nadhim Zahawi and Rishi Sunak’s tax affairs remind us again that we aren’t all in this together

I THINK it’s about time that Nadhim Zahawi took an extended break from politics to spend more time with his money.

Hey, who knows, he might even be able to discover exactly how much he’s got.

That’ll be useful when the taxman comes calling.

Zahawi is the chairman of the Conservative Party and minister without portfolio.

He has just admitted that he paid back tax he owed plus a whopping fine — all totalling several million quid — to the Inland Revenue.

This is because he was “careless” when filling in his tax forms.

And they clobbered him.

In other words he . . . um . . . how can I put this . . . under-estimated how much wonga he had.

Just a slip of the pen, you see. Could happen to anyone. Or anyone who is a multi-millionaire.

There’s now an investigation into the whole business.

But Rishi Sunak is a fool if he waits for its conclusions.

As Keir Starmer rightly said, you can’t have a tax avoider in charge of taxpayers’ money.

Starmer was also right when he called Sunak “weak” for not sacking the bloke.

But the other problem Rishi has is this.

He has also faced one or two questions about his family’s dealings with the taxman.

In April last year it was revealed that his wife Akshata Murty had been claiming “non-dom” status to avoid paying tax in this country.

Yes, she’s married to our Prime Minister, but she’d been paying the bulk of her income tax somewhere else.

She subsequently promised to pay UK taxes on her overseas income, but many took the view that it all wasn’t quite right.

What it does is remind people, if they ever needed reminding, that the elite which runs us — the Conservative elite — is not like the rest of us. We are not “all in it together”.

Both Rishi and Nadhim are absolutely rolling in it.

Now, I suspect that the average voter doesn’t really care how much money a politician may have squirreled away.

So long as they are honest and are doing a good job of running the country.

But they’re not, are they?

Getting information about whether they pay enough tax is like wringing blood from a stone. Just ask the Inland Revenue.

Pampered spivs

And you would have to be out of your box on ketamine to believe they were doing a brilliant job of running the country.

It all feeds into the notion that there is one rule for them and one rule for the rest of us.

That they are a different class of people. Who move in very exalted ­circles.

For example, tell me this.

Have you ever popped round to a mate’s house for a bite to eat and been offered a very attractive loan of one million quid?

Does that happen often, in the circles you move in?

That’s what happened to Boris Johnson. (Come on, you remember him.)

Couple of mates decided over dinner to fix a loan for BoJo who was feeling a bit hard up on his £164,000 salary.

One of the blokes who did the fixing, a man called Richard Sharp, was appointed as chairman of the BBC by . . . er . . . Boris Johnson. Bingo!

It’s stuff like that which rankles with the rest of us, and rightly so.

It’s also a signal that this government has pretty much had it.

There’s no longer a sense of dignity or honesty.

Just a bunch of pampered spivs doing everything they can to keep hold of their moola.

THEY’VE moved the hands of the Doomsday Clock ten seconds closer to midnight.

The Doomsday Clock shows us how long we have left before we’re all annihilated.

We’ve now got 90 seconds. Just enough time to put the bins out.

While things don’t look too good right now, are we really closer to worldwide annihilation than at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis? Or the blockade of Berlin?

Lloyd out of order

IF there were a competition to find the most odious politician in Westminster, it would of course be a closely fought affair.

There are plenty deserving of that title.

Tory Caroline Nokes, for example, would probably be in with a shout.

The Lib Dem contender would be the idiotic Lynne Featherstone, who has the IQ of a bowl of gravy.

But I still think they’d lose out to the horrible far-left woke muppet Lloyd Russell-Moyle, the Labour MP for Brighton Kemptown.

His latest bit of bullying petulance was to intimidate Tory MP Miriam Cates for the crime of speaking perfect sense during the debate over the Gender Recognition Act.

He launched a furious, nasty attack upon the woman.

Then crossed the floor of the House and sat staring at her.

West's united oon Vlad

AT last, the Germans have shown a bit of spine.

They will sanction the transfer to Ukraine of a whole bunch of tanks.

They’d been opposed for ages because they are scared stiff of Vladimir Putin.

The decision from the Germans should show Putin that the West is more united than ever behind Ukraine.

And that the only course of action he has left is to get his troops out of a sovereign country. Including Crimea.

The lesson needs to be rammed home to both Putin and any other ultra nationalist Russian leader who takes over when Vlad mysteriously drops dead, glowing like a Belisha beacon.

Which I suspect may be quite soon.

North needs more

A THINK tank has just discovered what we up here have suspected for a long time.

The north of England hasn’t got a pot to p**s in.

I mean, they didn’t quite put it like that.

The IPPR suggested the North got less investment than pretty much any part of Europe.

We’re just above Greece.

That’s why there was so much cynicism about the Government’s pathetic “levelling up” dosh last week.

In which London got MORE than the North East!

The North has been starved of money for too long.

We need decent transport infrastructure and investment in industry.

Unless this wretched government wants the divide to grow still wider – and leave us on a par with Somalia.

CHOCOLATE company Mars changed the footwear of its M&M characters to make them look more woke.

But then everybody complained and so it seems they have ditched their cartoon mascots.

Nobody likes woke.

As companies who go down that route quickly find out. If they truly wanted to be “progressive” they’d change the name of their company.

Mars was the God of War, which isn’t very left wing at all.

They should rename it Wumple, after the God of Being Nice to Little Kittens.

Shrink to fit

GOOD news! China is shrinking.

Not the whole country, obvs. That would be weird. But its population.

Pretty soon it will be under one billion.

Populations are beginning to decrease in quite a few countries.

This is all very, very good. Our planet is too crowded.

Now we need to make sure politicians don’t try to reverse the trend – as they are trying to do in China.

The fewer the people, the happier we’ll be.