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A country in deep crisis ought to at least have a government capable of governing; it is post-Brexit Britain’s unlucky fate to be run by an administration in a similar state of breakdown. The Tory party chair, Nadhim Zahawi, has been found to have committed a serious breach of the ministerial code and finally sacked. The investigation into bullying accusations against Dominic Raab, the deputy prime minister, is yet to conclude. Meanwhile, the latest story centred on Boris Johnson grinds on.
If it was a play, it would sit awkwardly between thriller and farce, with characters that were well drawn, and well connected. Johnson, we know: the financially incontinent prime minister who desperately needed an £800,000 “credit facility”. Then there is Sam Blyth, a “distant cousin” of Johnson and founder of a chain of Canadian private schools, apparently persuaded to be the then prime minister’s loan guarantor. The cast is completed by Richard Sharp, the former banker and Tory donor who is now the chair of the BBC, and Simon Case, Britain’s most senior civil servant. Questions now swirl around Sharp’s alleged dealings with the other three, in the weeks and months before he was appointed to his role at the BBC. Last Monday, Johnson said that Sharp “knows absolutely nothing about my personal finances – I can tell you that for ding-dang sure”. Over the weekend, the Sunday Times published a leaked letter reportedly handed to Johnson by Case: “Given the imminent announcement of Richard Sharp as the new BBC chair,” it said, “it is important that you no longer ask his advice about your personal financial matters.” We now await enlightenment about how both these things could possibly be true.
By way of shining a bit more light on this particular story, consider the backgrounds of the actors in it. Johnson, of course, was educated at Eton College and Oxford University. Sharp, whose father was the chairman of Cable & Wireless plc and became Baron Sharp of Grimsdyke, was a sixth former at the private Merchant Taylors’ school in north-west London, and also went to Oxford; his twin sister is the president of the King’s Bench Division of the high court. Sunak – who worked for Sharp at the investment bank Goldman Sachs – is another Oxford alumnus, and an old boy of Winchester College; Case went to the independent Bristol Grammar School, and Trinity College, Cambridge.
And so it goes on. Sharp’s appointment as BBC chair is being reviewed by the commissioner for public appointments, William Shawcross – another Old Etonian and Oxford graduate, whose daughter Eleanor (St Paul’s School for Girls, then Oxford) is Sunak’s policy chief.
