‘It’s what they do’: voters in Sunak’s Yorkshire seat react to wife’s tax status
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
Read more on theguardian.com
