Rishi Sunak urged to encourage Nadhim Zahawi to resign

Rishi Sunak should encourage the Conservative party chair, Nadhim Zahawi, to resign because his position is untenable, a former Tory cabinet minister said.

Zahawi was urged by the Conservative peer Lord Hayward and David Gauke to consider his position, as he comes under increasing pressure over his tax affairs, with Sunak braced for a grilling on prime minister's questions.

Keir Starmer, the Labour leader, is expected to question Sunak on why he has refused to give in to pressure to fire Zahawi, and ask exactly what the prime minister knew when he appoints Zahawi to the cabinet-attending role.

Gauke, who resigned as a cabinet minister in 2019, told BBC Radio 4 s Today programme on Wednesday that the prime minister should encourage Zahawi to quit before a very uncomfortable PMQs.

The former justice secretary said: I think I would be very tempted to, and if I was the prime minister, I think I would be keen to encourage it. I think it is going to be very uncomfortable for Rishi Sunak at 12 o clock today if Nadhim Zahawi is still in place.

Although Nadhim is a very popular figure with Conservative MPs, it is hard to see how this doesn't end in his resignation.

There are just too many impossible questions for him and the longer this drags on the more difficult it is for the prime minister, the more difficult it is for the Conservative party, probably the more difficult it is for Nadhim Zahawi. Hayward said that he should consider whether he stands aside for the period of inquiry, because we don't know what the timescales are for the inquiry. The shadow levelling secretary, Lisa Nandy, accused Sunak of trying to kick this into the long grass by launching an ethics investigation into Zahawi's tax affairs.

The prime minister ordered his ethics adviser to investigate whether Zahawi broke ministerial rules over the estimated 4.8 m bill he settled with HMRC while chancellor.

The government has tried to kick this into the long grass with an investigation rather than Nadhim Zahawi, who is in a prominent position in British politics and has come clean about what happened when he was chancellor, and it is deeply frustrating for the public, deeply frustrating for those who have questions about Nadhim Zahawi's tax affairs and threatened with legal action. The senior Conservative MP Caroline Nokes has called for Zahawi to stand aside until the matter is cleared up. Former director of communications Craig Oliver has also urged Zahawi to do the prime minister a favour and step down because he said that his error over shares in the YouGov polling company he co-founded was careless and not deliberate, and he said that he was confident that he acted properly throughout the matter.