Former chancellor Nadhim Zahawi has defected to Reform. It’s another Conservative scalp that lands some impressive headlines for Nigel Farage: Zahawi is now the most senior former office holder to join the party. But Zahawi didn’t talk much about his stint at the Treasury at today’s press conference (12 January) and Farage, I am told, has no plans to appoint Zahawi as chancellor in a Reform government.
Zahawi held the job for only 63 days at the tail-end of the Boris Johnson ministry and is distinguished as one of the few chancellors who never delivered a fiscal statement. One of the most significant things Zahawi did was to withdraw his candidacy for Tory leader, during the race to replace Johnson, and to throw his support behind Liz Truss.
Like Jake Berry, the short-serving Tory chairman who defected to Reform last year, Zahawi is a figure who rose high and fell fast in the chaos of 2022 and is now hoping to have another go at front-line politics. He is also another former ally of Boris Johnson to make the move, and said today: “I could very easily spend the rest of my life back in business, which I’ve been enjoying since leaving parliament.” Instead he said he wants to save the UK from “the last-chance saloon”.
Instead of talking economics at today’s press conference, Zahawi chose to focus on his time as a junior minister in the Department of Health, where he was put in charge of vaccine deployment during the Covid-19 pandemic. While his claim that he was “the most popular politician, probably” at that time is doubtful, it is certainly a legacy he can boast about more than his chancellorship.
Farage said today that Zahawi commands “gravitas and respect”. Not in the country at large, perhaps, but among the ranks of ex-Tory MPs who lost their seats at the last election, maybe. Zahawi also anticipated inevitable questions about his tax affairs, which dogged him during that brief stint at the Treasury (after a tax error that he described as “careless”, Zahawi paid a £5m settlement to HMRC).
He described the original newspaper reports of a HMRC investigation in 2022 as “smears”. Rishi Sunak later sacked Zahawi from his job as Conservative chairman because his failure to declare the tax investigation was judged by the PM’s ethics adviser to have breached the ministerial code. Zahawi and Farage also batted away a question about the coterie of eccentric “vaccine sceptics” that Reform has attracted.
[Further reading: Only Reform voters can save Labour]
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