Nadhim Zahawi’s resignation letter notably contained no apology to Rishi Sunak for his breach of the ministerial code. Nor did not it reference what we shall, depressingly, just refer to as Taxgate. Today, allies of the newly ex-Chairman are going further and suggesting the investigation – and subsequent report by Laurie Magnus, the Prime Minister’s advisor on ministerial interests – which triggered his defenestration was rushed and unfair.
The central issue – the aspect of the code which Zahawi is said to have breached – is whether Zahawi let the Permanent Secretary at the Treasury know he was being investigated by HMRC, and updated his declaration of interests form accordingly. Magnus’ report suggests he did not, and thus broke the code.
But Zahawi’s allies claim this is wrong, and that he did inform Tom Scholar – then, pre-Kwasi Kwarteng, still the Permanent Secretary at the Treasury – about the investigation and penalty. They also suggest his register of interests was updated by September when Liz Truss appointed him Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. And so it thus will have been when (one mistimed Op-ed later) Sunak shuffled him over to CCHQ.
The suggestion is that Zahawi had wanted to go through all this with Magnus in a second meeting this week since he did not have the opportunity to do so in their first 30-minute chat. Yet the report was finalised quickly and released over the weekend before he had had the chance to do so.
From personal conversations, some of those close to Zahawi were confident, pre-report, that there would be no need for him to update his Linked-In again today. They thought he would be cleared, for the basic reason that he had done nothing wrong. Zahawi is thus suggesting that this report was produced too quickly, this denying him the time to properly defend himself.