Whoever wins the election,
France is ready to explode
Weekend essay
Pages 34-35
Aasmah Mir Notebook
all of them. A chancellor might
equally say to a columnist: “Unless
you’ve experienced the cruel choices
a chancellor must make between
meeting competing human needs on
the one hand, and stopping taxation
from strangling the economy on the
other, you’re in no position to judge
me.” We can do this walk-a-mile-in-
my-moccasins stuff till the cows come
home, but touchy-feely doesn’t help
holding the balance. Altitude can.
Besides, if we’re to bar the doors of
Downing Street to the rich, then how
rich? Billions? Hundreds of
thousands? The “they must
empathise” argument falls apart
when we realise that the accretion of
wealth is subject to the law of
diminishing returns. The gap
between the life-experiences of Rishi
Sunak in his Yorkshire home and Sir
Keir Starmer in his north London
townhouse is minuscule compared
with the difference between a
destitute mother at a foodbank and
someone earning £35,000 a year in a
terraced house in Peterborough.
Many politicians are in closer touch
with the conditions of the poor than
most of the British middle class.
What, then, does matter? That
Sunak, Boris Johnson, Jeremy
Hunt or any other aspirant to No 10
has the knowledge, the intelligence,
the sympathies and the
competence we expect in those with
power over the lives of the poor. And
that, as the biographies of great
world leaders demonstrate again
and again, has nothing to do with
their personal wealth.Wealth envy shouldn’t bar Sunak from No 10
The chancellor has fallen victim to a form of prejudice but he can get ahead of the game by abolishing non-dom status
TOM STODDART/GETTY IMAGES
Kindness, sympathy, humanity are of
course always valuable, but a
ministerial (and, even more so,
prime-ministerial) “yes” to one cause
is so often a “no” to another. You
have to stand back.
“Unless you’ve actually experienced
what having nothing feels like, I don’t
think you can know what it means,”
Caitlin says. Very likely true. And
I’ve never suffered serious disability
or attended a sink school. I’ve never
lacked food. I’ve never given birth.
I’ve never needed cancer treatment. I
don’t care for ballet dancing. I’ve
never experienced sexual attraction
towards a child. I don’t want to
transition. I’ve no interest in football.
The list of things any candidate for
high office hasn’t experienced first-
hand will always be long, yet in power
he or she will have to judge between
competing demands from, or about,Margaret Thatcher wasn’t keen for
her husband Denis to appear wealthyconclude that (as Foges puts it)
“detachment from ‘real life’ will lead
to poor policy”. Seductive thinking.
Should access to great wealth debar
a person from high public office?
Two different reasons have been
suggested for this. The first is that,
simply because there’s a measure of
public resentment of wealth in top
politicians, that should disqualify the
rich from leadership. “Perhaps
unfairly,” its advocates murmur.
Again, hmm. Try the phrase out
when used of a would-be leader who
is non-white, gay, an unmarried
mother or simply female. There was
a time when (“perhaps unfairly”) all
of these objections have been raised.
I dare say murmurings of “perhaps
unfairly” were heard from some Tory
members opposed to Sunak’s
selection as the candidate in a very
white, partly rural north Yorkshire
constituency. Rumours about Ted
Heath’s sexuality were used against
him “perhaps unfairly” too.
Well, we should give short shrift to
prejudice by proxy. Stand up for
what you yourself believe. That’s
how civilisation makes progress.
How about a different argument:
that a leader will be “out of touch”
without having the “lived experience”
of people he or she exercises power
over. In an age of feel-your-pain, we
hear this argument everywhere. It is
preposterous, and takes us
uncomfortably close to distrusting
anyone who has achieved great
success. We need more achievers,
not fewer, in leadership roles.
There was once an excellent word:
disinterested. Now misused, it meant
“uninvolved” or “no axe to grind”
and signified approval: a virtue in
anyone who must adjudicate.
Adjudication is what so much
ministerial decision-making involves,
and for this a measure of emotional
detachment is a strength not a lack.W
hen a horrified
leader of the
opposition saw her
multimillionaire
spouse proudly park
a new Rolls-Royce in front of the
couple’s Chelsea home, she ordered
him to garage it immediately.
Sometimes wisdom arrives more
reliably through the kneejerk than
the brain. Margaret Thatcher’s
instinctive recoil from being seen as
the wife of a very rich consort didn’t
make her a more sympathetic woman,
but it demonstrated a canny readiness
to pre-empt political difficulty.
Rishi Sunak, a kinder, cleverer and
more thoughtful person than she,
should have pre-empted. He could
have defused the “non-dom”
landmine by volunteering information
on his wife’s tax arrangements earlier
in his career. The media is not
interested in old news.
But having fallen behind the game,
he now has an opportunity to get
ahead of it. How about closing the
non-dom loophole? None of Sunak’s
predecessors, Conservative or
Labour, has done so. He might
rescue his reputation while making a
very sensible change at the same
time. Speaking for Labour on BBC
radio, Emily Thornberry’s response
implied that ministers (and
presumably shadow ministers) should
open their family’s tax arrangements
to full public inspection. This
certainly isn’t Labour policy. Perhaps
it should be Tory policy? I smile to
remember the fuss when it emerged
posthumously that Tony Benn had
been able to leave his entire fortune,
some £6 million in today’s prices, to
his family through (lawful) avoidance
of inheritance tax.
But let’s be honest. This huge row is
really about Sunak being personally
rich, with access to even greater
riches. I may wonder — I do —
whether if his spouse had been a white
Boston literary agent of independent
wealth rather than a brown Indian
businesswoman, her arrangements
would have met quite the barrage of
sniffy indignation that Akshata
Murty faces, but I accept that wealth
not colour is what it’s really all about.
So let’s take head on that dislike of
wealth in politics, as two of my Times
colleagues have done in the last
fortnight. Their columns are
important commentary on a matter
of much public concern. And both
make my blood boil.
Take Clare Foges’s column on
Monday. “Rishi Sunak is too wealthy
to be prime minister: The chancellor
will, perhaps unfairly, always beovershadowed by the mountains of
cash sitting in his family’s vault.” Or
Caitlin Moran’s argument the prior
Wednesday: “Millionaires shouldn’t
be in charge of poor people’s budgets.
They’re not qualified — unless
you’ve actually experienced what
having nothing feels like, I don’t
think you can know what it means.”
Such opinion has grown fast during
my lifetime. But even in 1984 as a
young Tory MP, I made my reputation
by living on the dole in Newcastle for
a week, for TV. This was praised as a
brave and useful thing to do. Hmm.
Useful to my own career, certainly.
Both Clare and Caitlin’s columnsWe’re uncomfortably
close to distrusting
anyone who achieves
Comment
Matthew
Parrisred box
For the best analysis
and commentary on
the political landscape
thetimes.co.ukget out there. If you can’t work from
home, talk to your employer. And
say what? I’ve got Covid but I’m still
coming in to breathe all over you.
How does that work? So, yes, being
virtually the last person in the
country to get Covid has been
an utter borefest. Stuck at
home with a six-year-old who
insisted on hours of TV, three
breakfasts, doing Wordle and
some godawful maths thing
called Nerdle has finished
me off.
I’ll be back in the
office on Monday
ready to lick you all.
It’s perfectly legal, you
know.Muslim...ish
I
was tucking in to
one of our three
breakfasts the other
day when my
daughter grabbed my
spoon midwaybetween the bowl and my mouth.
“Hang on mummy, isn’t it
Ramadan?” I froze. Damn. “Aren’t
you supposed to be fasting?” Ah yes
well, mummy isn’t that kind of
Muslim. The good kind that prays
five times a day, observes Ramadan
and can read the Quran. Your
mummy is more of a pick ’n’ mix
Muslim. I don’t drink beer or eat
pork but I have kissed lots of boys.
“So you’re Muslim-ish?” she asks.
Yes, I suppose I am.Proper dates
S
peaking of boys, I enjoyed Matt
Rudd’s column in the Sunday
Times Magazine in which he
poked fun at both old and modern
dating. I haven’t dated since 2004
but it looks pretty grim out there.
People on dating apps sound
mostly mad; driven by other’s
unspeakable behaviour and the
volume of lonely souls to become
just as shallow and mendacious. I
still love the idea of a phonenumber written on a napkin, a
one-hour conversation on a landline,
a phone-free unrushed dinner, tall
candles and a slow walk home. The
world may have moved on but I
have not.What a card
M
y smallest fan insisted on
celebrating my “half-birthday”
this week. She drew a treasure
map and rammed it into an empty
plastic bottle. We had to cut the bottle
open to retrieve the map, but still. She
made a card that had six pages in it of
hearts and jokes and drawings of us.
She had run out of ideas by page
four but the best bit was a poem she
said she had written herself.
“Some food is sweet, some food are
filled with meat.” And that is how
you have a party, people.Aasmah Mir co-presents Times Radio
Breakfast, Monday to ThursdayCarol Midgley is awaynever going out because I’m a single
mother who goes to bed at 8.30pm
and gets up at 3.10am. Second,
everyone has had it and is now so
over Covid that no one gives a flying
fig about how thick the line on
your lateral flow test is or
what your symptoms are.
For two years now I’ve
had to sit and listen to
friends and family giving
blow by blow, sneeze by
sneeze accounts of their
coughs, their
temperatures, their
inability to smell or
taste. And now it’s
my turn? Bo-ring.
In fact I tested
positive on the day
that free tests in
England ended and
the advice on what
you actually do
completely changed.
Got Covid? Pull
yourself together andI
don’t follow the crowd. I’m not a
sheep. If there’s a must-have item,
it must never cross the threshold
of my house. I never did that sad
sourdough thing. The latest must-
watch on Netflix? I’ll watch it next
year. And so it is the same with Covid,
which finally came to visit my
daughter and me last week. But
being late to the party has not been
satisfying in the slightest. In fact it
has been infuriating on many levels.
First, I was fully invested in being
part of an elite that somehow
managed to dodge it, mainly by
These days
no one cares
if you’ve
got Covid b
the times | Saturday April 9 2022 27