All was quiet on Friday outside the £1.5m North Yorkshire manor house the Sunaks occasionally call home – apart from the builders beavering away on the swimming pool being constructed in the paddock by the family lake. One of the workers said he had never met their clients, but he knew all about the tax arrangements of Akshata Murty, better known round these parts as Mrs Sunak. Was he bothered? He shrugged. “It’s what they do.” Who? “Rich people. They don’t pay tax and poor people do.” A few miles up the road in Northallerton, the biggest town in Sunak’s Richmond constituency, there was genuine anger from some staunch Conservative voters at Murty’s non-dom status.
“It matters,” said 79-year-old Carole Gates “If they [the Sunaks] are both resident in the UK they should be paying all their taxes here. “It makes me cross and it does change my opinion of Rishi. I thought he was doing his best and that he was doing quite a good job, but he has gone down in my estimation a lot.” She wasn’t sure she could vote for him again. But where to go instead? She wrinkled her nose at the suggestion of Keir Starmer’s Labour party. Others had already fallen out of love with Sunak before the latest revelations. Hotel housekeeper Jade Green, 27, accused Sunak of having no idea what life was like for ordinary people. Sunak’s decision to lend struggling households £200 to help with their soaring energy bills had gone down particularly badly. “I’ve worked my arse off to get out of debt and I feel like this will get me back into it again,” she said. “The cost of everything is going up. It costs me £30 a week to drive to work now – that’s three hours wages for me. Sunak hasn’t got a clue.” Though she is in work, Green relies on universal credit to pay most of her rent, and the government’s housing allowance is too meagre to cover most properties in affluent Northallerton, she complained.
The wider constituency is one of the wealthiest in the north of England, ranked 450th out of 533 on the index of multiple deprivation. Outside Betty’s tea room, Ronnie Wood (“not that one”), said he was done with the Tories. Murty’s non-dom status is “just another skeleton being brought out of the closet”, said the 61-year-old. He was sceptical whether it would change anything – “I find it disappointing the complacency of the general public, how accepting people are. I think we should expect more of our MPs.” But he personally was not voting Conservative again, because of Boris Johnson, not Sunak: “I don’t believe a word he says.” Gary Scaife, a retired doubleglazing fitter enjoying an alfresco pint with his wife, Julie, thought Sunak’s political career was not yet dead. “I still think he is a good lad. I think he will still be the next prime minister whenever Boris Johnson goes, but I won’t be voting for him again,” he said. Why? “Taxes. Everything is going up. My van used to cost £155 a year to tax – I just renewed it and it’s £275.” Despite widespread anger in the constituency, no one seemed to think Sunak was in any danger of losing the seat he has held since 2015, when he took over from William Hague.
He won a 27,210 majority in 2019, with Labour coming a very distant second. Some defended him on the basis that Murty hadn’t done anything illegal. And as one woman put it: “At the end of the day, he kept everyone fed and watered and put a roof over everyone’s head during the lockdowns, and their taxes are their business and nobody’s else’s.” Sunak remains popular among many local business owners, even in the pubs where the teetotal chancellor never orders a pint. Deba Crow-Clark, landlady of the Tickle Toby Inn, said Sunak had helped her personally: “He’s never been anything other than supportive to us, and also to my sister, who runs an ice-cream parlour over the road. “She’s actually friends with him. They go to a step class together at the local leisure centre. He goes there on a Sunday with his security guards.” She didn’t know much about the tax stuff – “But who likes paying taxes? I know I don’t want to pay inheritance tax, for example, so who am I to criticise? But I don’t have a bad word to say about Rishi or his wife.”