The Nadhim Zahawi affair has exposed all too brutally a key weakness in Rishi Sunak’s political make-up: he simply struggles to sound like a leader, rather than a follower ✒️ paulwaugh for ipaperviews PMQs
But leaders sometimes need to be feared as well as liked, and to take swift decisive action, even when not all the facts are available – or more precisely because not all the facts are made available by the minister involved. Clearly, Zahawi didn’t fear his own Prime Minister enough to avoid landing him with the humiliating defence he made last week.
Real leadership can also mean telling your party things it doesn’t want to hear. Sunak did that on the debt-fuelled tax cuts of the Truss experiment, but when it comes to swiftly sacking ministers who appear to have misled him he’s left looking like an innocent abroad. Sunak’s wider problem is that if he doesn’t look like he can show the smack of firm government of his own troops, how can he show he has a firm grip on the Government of the country?as he showed a bare-knuckle menace that his opponent sorely lacks. His jibe that “we all know why” the PM was reluctant to ask Zahawi “questions about family finances and tax avoidance” made several Tory MPs look very uncomfortable indeed.
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