At today’s PMQs the MPs were told NOT to raise the the Rishi Sunak childcare shares row.
The row started during a parliamentary committee hearing on March 28, Mr Sunak did not mention his wife’s links to Koru Kids, despite being questioned by MPs over the childcare policy. This has led to concerns about how open Mr Sunak was being about potential interest in the policy.
Paul Waugh tweeted: “The Commons Speaker has warned MPs not to raise @RishiSunak‘s childcare shares row in #PMQs today. But here’s the real story behind the story: Govt is helping private equity-backed “agencies” as a privatised alternative to Ofsted. With taxpayer cash.”
Paul Waugh also said the Department for Education has been unsually coy about revealing details of how many meetings it has had with Koru Kids, the childminding agency part-owned by Sunak’s wife. Waugh writes:
“On the issue of engagement with the childcare sector, things are a bit murky to say the least. A Freedom of Information request was submitted to the Department for Education (DfE) in January, asking for records of any meetings between ministers, officials and Koru Kids since last October.
“The DfE replied that “a minister has decided that, in their reasonable opinion, disclosure of the records of meetings that ministers/officials have conducted with Koru Kids is likely to have [an] inhibitive and prejudicial effect” on “the effective conduct of public affairs”, on free and frank exchanges of views in government and on the formulation of policy.”
Published
The Cabinet Office has just published the revised list of ministers’ interests. This is the document that is supposed get updated every six months, but which has not been updated for around a year – partly because it’s the job of the No 10 independent adviser on ministers’ interests (aka, the ethics adviser), and for months the post was empty because two of Boris Johnson’s resigned, and then he gave up trying to find a replacement.
So this means that it couldn’t be mentioned at PMQs, don’t you love democracy?
Nailed
Before PMQs Stella Creasy was on BBC’s Politics Live joined by Tory Tim Loughton.
Tim defended the PM, saying that there is no way he would create a law just to make his wife more money, he probably didn’t even know his wife had interests in this sector, they have so many business interests.
Creasy reply that sums it up. She said even if it wasn’t malicious, these people live in another world, where they don’t even know how many investments their own wife has!
I wish my partner would announce we had a major shares in a huge company, but it NOT going to happen!
Related: Are these PMQs questions Sunak should answer? One isn’t allowed!
