Rishi’s wife pays high price for his political ambitions
POLITICS, it is said, is a rough old trade and Rishi Sunak and his family have been finding that out the hard way. The Chancellor may have thought he had steeled himself for the worst that opponents could throw at him, but he clearly did not anticipate his wife, the Indian billionairess Akshata Murty, coming under attack over her personal financial affairs.
Ms Murty’s completely legal non-domicile tax status has meant her not paying tax in the UK on her overseas earnings, thereby avoiding the peril of being double-taxed in India, where her father’s successful business empire in which she holds a major shareholding is based, as well as over here.
To pay tax in the UK on her UK earnings and tax in India on her overseas earnings, as well as paying a £30,000 annual fee to sustain that arrangement, may hardly have seemed to Ms Murty to be a cushy deal.
Nonetheless, she was wise to decide last night that from now on she will voluntarily pay tax in the UK on her overseas earnings after acknowledging the arrangement did not seem compatible with “the British sense of fairness”.
So called “non-dom” status, which Ms Murty will formally retain, has been offered by Britain to wealthy foreign nationals for many years on the basis that having them living here, running businesses, creating jobs, spending money and paying tax on their UK earnings is a net benefit to our society. That is why, when he was chancellor, Labour’s Gordon Brown decided against abolishing it.
WERE Ms Murty not married to the man who sets the tax framework for everyone else in the country then her non-dom status would have passed without comment. But as the wife of the Chancellor she has found herself at the centre of an intense media storm, with every aspect of her professional life up for debate and comment.
It must be a shocking and traumatic experience for someone who never sought the limelight. For Mr Sunak the sight of his wife suffering waves of attacks on account of the office that he holds will also have been very difficult to bear.
As he told an interviewer on Thursday: “To smear my wife to get at me is awful. She loves her country like I love mine. I would hope that most fairminded people would understand – though I appreciate that it is a confusing situation – that she is from another country. Every single penny that she earns in the UK she pays UK taxes on, of course she does. And every penny that she earns internationally, for example in India, she would pay the full taxes on that.”
Unfortunately, when you are a very senior player in our adversarial political system, expecting fair-mindedness may be rather naïve. And when you are a Chancellor putting up the taxes of your own compatriots, a desperate opposition Labour
Party that has lost four elections in a row is likely to use every dirty tactic available.
The relentless bombardment suffered by Mr Sunak in recent weeks is partly due to his own mistakes, such as pushing out a photograph of himself at a petrol station filling up a modest car that turned out to belong to someone else. In greater part it is down to the fact that he is no longer playing the role of the Covid financial saviour, doling out free money to millions of workers and businesses.
Instead he must now look to recoup lost revenue, in effect transforming himself from Robin Hood into the Sheriff of Nottingham with predictable consequences for his popularity. Questions are legitimately being asked about his own financial affairs, including him holding a United States “green card” for more than a year after becoming Chancellor.
Following this move from his wife Labour must surely now call off the dogs.
IT is in fact remarkable that most of the attacks coming from the Left depend on the notion of a wife being a mere adjunct to her husband, rather than an independent earner in her own right. Such Edwardian-style thinking should have been ditched decades ago, especially by those considered political “progressives”.
And yet, as the Sunaks came to realise, some of the mud was sticking and Ms Murty’s determination that her tax status should not be “a distraction” for her husband or be allowed to put her family under public pressure will mean that from now on she pays millions in extra tax in Britain on earnings generated and taxed elsewhere.
While she can certainly afford it, the furore will surely lead to other high-achievers deciding that the aggravation associated with a career in politics is simply not worth it. And that can hardly be in the public interest.
‘Most attacks depend on a wife being an adjunct to her husband’