Hypocrisy of the Sunak kind

What makes hypocrisy so devastating is the terrible shamelessness that goes with it. In the famous scene in Casablanca, the policeman shuts down Rick’s Café Americain, saying: “I am shocked – shocked to find that gambling is going on in here.” A croupier approaches: “Your winnings sir.” “Oh thank you,” says the policeman, pocketing his cash. “Right, everybody out!”

It’s a brilliant moment that shows the hypocrite in all his glory – he’s the one who carries on, as if what everyone can plainly see is not happening at all. What you think is happening is not happening. In other words, the hypocrite’s most important asset is a brass bloody neck.

Politics is especially fertile ground when it comes to demonstrations of total, misplaced self-confidence – see for example Liz Truss’s staggeringly delusional and also unintentionally hilarious book tour. But in terms of pure, weapons-grade hypocrisy, the allegations that have surfaced about the Tory MP Mark Menzies are from the top drawer.

The allegation, which Menzies denies, is that he called an aide in the middle of the night last December begging for £5,000, telling her that he had been locked in his flat by “some bad people” and that it was a “life and death” situation. The aide is said to have given Menzies £6,500, which was reimbursed from Conservative campaign funds.

Leaving aside the speculation about what an MP was doing to allegedly put himself into “life and death” situations that required an emergency bailout at three o’clock in the morning, the point is that the Conservative Party knew about these allegations three months ago.

It was only when the story was set out in Thursday’s Times, along with other allegations about Menzies’ use of campaign money, that the government finally decided that he should lose the whip. It would take an act of extreme intellectual contortion to conclude anything other than the government was simply hoping the whole thing would just go away.

But it didn’t. And during the three months that the government has been sitting on those allegations, it has spent a fair chunk of that time attacking Angela Rayner, the deputy leader of the Labour Party, about a house sale, and a possible outstanding tax bill of £3,500.

Under political pressure from Tory MPs, the police have been called in to investigate Rayner, and so excited was the prime minister at the prospect of landing a blow on Keir Starmer, that he has been taunting the Labour leader from the despatch box.

At PMQs, a day before the Menzies allegations became public, when asked by Keir Starmer about Truss’s book, the prime minister responded, “All I would say is he ought to spend a bit less time reading that book and a bit more time reading the deputy leader’s tax advice.”

And here is the hypocrisy of it all – Sunak would have uttered those words at PMQs knowing, all the while, about the much more serious allegations against one of his own MPs, allegations about which – at the time – he had done nothing. He also made his comments about “tax advice” while knowing that through the use of “non-dom” status, his wife, the daughter of a billionaire, had significantly reduced her tax bills in the UK.

Sunak, therefore, is a hypocrite and hypocrisy is not a good look. Consider the latter stages of John Major’s time in office, when he launched his notorious “Back to Basics” campaign, a call for Britain to return to a shared sense of common decency and conventional family values.

That campaign was scuppered by a litany of Tory sex scandals, which made the party not only look sleazy, but also hypocritical – the government was calling on the people to do one thing, while in secret the Tories were getting up to all sorts. It later transpired that even Major himself was having an affair with his colleague Edwina Currie.

Boris Johnson was also brought down by an outstanding commitment to hypocrisy. There are so many examples to choose from, but perhaps the winning entry is that he imposed a nationwide lockdown, while simultaneously overseeing a packed schedule of No.10 piss-ups, with suitcases full of booze, wall-to-wall puking and no social distancing. It was the hypocrisy of Partygate that did for him.

The problem hypocrites face is that the moral structure of their wrongdoing is so glaringly obvious. You shut the country down and had parties. You said Back to Basics, but secretly you were all at it. You went after Angie Rayner when you knew all about the Menzies stuff and you did nothing about it. You quibble about other people’s tax – what about yours?

Shameless hypocrisy of the Major and Johnson kind turned out to be a sign that their administrations were in a final state of collapse. And so it is with Sunak. Not long to go now. Soon, the casino will be shut down and everyone will be thrown out.