Rishi Sunak entered at No. 10 and vowed “integrity” but had to apologize this week after not wearing a seat belt in a moving car.
It’s the latest in a string of gaffes that have led critics to accuse him of showing “the same disregard for the rules” as his predecessor as Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
Here are some of the former chancellor’s more (and less) recent mistakes:
Not buckled
Rishi Sunak posted a video on his Instagram account while in the back seat of his chauffeured car to promote the government’s improvement agenda during a visit to Lancashire.
However, online monitors found the Prime Minister was not wearing a seat belt and was subsequently handed a stiff penalty for the offense by Lancashire Police.
This makes Sunak the second prime minister in history to have been fined by the police while on his top job.
The first was Johnson, who was fined for attending parties at Downing Street during the Covid lockdown in the so-called Partygate scandal.
It is also the second fine Sunak has received in less than a year. He paid one as chancellor to attend a gathering to mark Johnson’s birthday during lockdown.
With jets to the north of England
Sunak has been accused by Labor of “jetting around the country like an A-list celebrity with taxpayers’ money” after traveling to Blackpool on a jet.
The Tory MP opted not to take the train and instead took the RAF jet from Northolt to Blackpool as part of a series of visits to northern England to promote the government’s improvement agenda.
It follows a pattern in which Sunak avoids rail travel and instead uses planes to visit the north. He used the RAF jet to travel to Scotland to announce two new ‘green free ports’ and also to Leeds.
Green MP Caroline Lucas said it was “completely untenable” for Tory ministers to take short trips by jet.
Admit taking funds from disadvantaged areas
Leaked footage showed Sunak bragging to Tory party members in Tunbridge Wells that he was diverting public money from deprived urban areas to wealthy cities.
In footage obtained by the New Statesman, the former chancellor said during his leadership campaign: “I’ve managed to change the funding formulas to ensure areas like this get the funding they deserve.
“We inherited a number of formulas from Labour, which pushed all funding into deprived urban areas and had to be reversed. I started working to undo that.”
In a PR stunt to promote a 5p fuel tax cut, Sunak clumsily attempted to pay for a can of soda by scanning his bank card with a barcode reader.
Widely mocked on social media, Sunak later admitted he needed someone to teach him how to use a contactless card machine.
“Since then someone taught me how to use this contactless device. And I’m telling you, this technology is an amazing modern marvel these days!”
“coke addict”
“I’m a Coke addict, I’m a total Coke addict,” he said in an interview with two giggling students, before quickly clarifying and explaining in case there was any confusion that he was “a Coke addict.” .
He went on to say his favorite is Mexican Cola. One viewer described it as a “scene from the office.”
He once said he had no working-class friends
In a 2001 BBC documentary called Middle Classes: Their Rise and Sprawl, a young Sunak spoke about his aristocratic friends and privileged education.
“I have friends who are aristocrats, I have friends who are upper class, I have friends who are working class … Well, not working class,” he said.
“I mix and match and then I go to kids at a central government school and tell them to apply to Oxford and talk to them about people like me and then at the end of the conversation with them I shock them for half an hour long and tell them I was in Winchester and one of my best friends from Eton and whatever and they’re like, ‘Oh, ok.'”
“We all say stupid things when we’re students,” he later told Andrew Neil.