'We should have never have got rid of Boris' says former Chancellor Nadhim Zahawi

18 May 2024, 20:18

Nadhim Zahawi says that the Conservatives were wrong to oust Boris Johnson two years ago.

In his first interview since leaving Government, Zahawi, 56, said that he and his colleagues were wrong to oust former Prime Minister Boris Johnson two years ago.

He described his former boss as the most "consequential" Tory leader since three-term Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

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Zahawi told The Times: “I wish we had held our nerve. Many colleagues got spooked. If colleagues had stepped back and just realised Twitter was not the country, we’d have probably made a very different decision.”

The outgoing MP for Stratford-on-Avon also addressed the fallout of him receiving a £1million fine from HM Revenue & Customs after not paying tax due on the sale of his shares in polling company YouGov.

Ahead of the release of The Boy from Baghdad: My Journey from Waziriyah to Westminster in August, the businessman turned politician said: “[What] I have tried to address … is there are no superhumans in politics. We are all fallible”

“When you come under attack your defences go up. When I look back, the mistake I made was not to be explicit about the settlement with HMRC.

"In my ministerial declaration, I should have put in what my accountants had agreed with HMRC … that it was careless, which is a category, and therefore non-deliberate, but I should have been clear that it came with a penalty attached to it. And that I didn’t [do].”

Of his threats to sue in the wake of the story, the Tory MP said: “There’s no doubt that those who were challenging me and attacking me were linking it to pretty horrific things.

"They were saying ‘oh, the SFO [Serious Fraud Office] is looking at your finances’, and the NCA [National Crime Agency]. I was like ‘What the hell is this?’ — it was my mistake.”

“I was answering the questions to the best of my ability. There are a lot of things that have been said about it that are inaccurate.”