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Rishi Sunak’s first three months as prime minister have been far from plain sailing.

Significant storm clouds are hanging over the government as the prime minister looks to overturn Labour’s commanding lead in the polls.

Despite Mr Sunak trying to distance himself from the turbulent premiership of Boris Johnson, rows over propriety and standards have continued.

Here, Sky News looks at the scandals and U-turns during his time as PM – including his sacking of Tory chairman Nadhim Zahawi.

Follow reaction to Zahawi’s sacking – live updates

Suella Braverman

British Home Secretary Suella Braverman walks outside Number 10 Downing Street, in London, Britain November 1, 2022. REUTERS/Hannah McKay

Just a few days into his premiership, Mr Sunak was under significant pressure over his reappointment of Suella Braverman as home secretary after a former party chair claimed she had committed “multiple breaches” of the ministerial code.

The week before, Ms Braverman had resigned from the same role in former PM Liz Truss’s government after using her personal email address to forward sensitive government documents, breaking the rules ministers have to abide by.

But Mr Sunak put her back into the Home Office on the following Tuesday, and stood by the decision after being pressed on it in the Commons the next day.

Former Tory Party chair Sir Jake Berry alleged “there were multiple breaches of the ministerial code”, while Nadhim Zahawi said officials within the Cabinet Office had warned against bringing her back due to security breaches.

Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer accused Mr Sunak of having done a “grubby deal” with Ms Braverman – a figure popular on the right of the party – in order to secure the keys to Number 10.

But the PM resisted the calls to sack Ms Braverman and she remains in post as home secretary.

Gavin Williamson

Cabinet Office minister Sir Gavin Williamson has strongly rejected the claims made by the former senior civil servant.

Mr Sunak’s judgement came under further scrutiny just a few weeks later after cabinet minister Sir Gavin Williamson quit, vowing to clear his name over bullying claims.

Sir Gavin, who at the time was attending cabinet as a minister without portfolio, was accused of abusive behaviour towards MPs and civil servants – but denies any wrongdoing.

He was accused of sending abusive text messages to Wendy Morton, the former chief whip under Liz Truss, complaining that he and other colleagues had been excluded from the Queen’s funeral for political reasons.

The prime minister tried to let an independent investigation into the matter run its course, defending Sir Gavin in media interviews for “expressing regret” while condemning his language.

But Liberal Democrat deputy leader Daisy Cooper accused Mr Sunak of ignoring the complaint and called for Sir Gavin to be sacked.

Sir Gavin was previously fired as defence secretary in May 2019 over allegations of leaking info from National Security Council meetings, and lost his job as education secretary after two years when Mr Johnson decided to drop him in a cabinet reshuffle.

But Mr Sunak did not pull the trigger to axe one of his biggest backers behind the scenes, with Sir Gavin opting to quit himself over the row.

Dominic Raab

Deputy Prime Minister Dominic Raab arriving in Downing Street

In November, numerous allegations about Justice Secretary Dominic Raab’s behaviour surfaced relating to his previous stint in the role under Mr Johnson, with staff reportedly offered a “route out” of his department when he was reinstated in October.

Civil servants who worked with him told The Guardian he was a “very rude and aggressive” boss while another report claimed the justice secretary had acquired the nickname “The Incinerator” because he “burns through” staff.

Despite the allegations, Mr Sunak stood by his close ally, telling reporters: “I don’t recognise that characterisation of Dominic and I’m not aware of any formal complaints about him.”

But additional weight was added to the claims following a report by Bloomberg that Simon Case, the head of the civil service, was told by senior officials of concerns about Mr Raab’s abrasive treatment of junior staff and took steps to try to improve his behaviour.

A Cabinet Office spokesperson at the time said: “We have no record of any formal complaints.”

It was revealed that Mr Raab has reportedly been the subject of formal bullying complaints by at least 24 civil servants.

Eight formal allegations have been levelled against the deputy prime minister and are being investigated by senior lawyer Adam Tolley KC.

But the PM has resisted calls to suspend Mr Raab while the probe is conducted.

Nadhim Zahawi

Nadhim Zahawi looks on outside the Conservative Campaign Headquarters

Earlier this month, The Sun On Sunday published a report claiming Mr Zahawi had paid a seven-figure sum to settle a tax dispute over the sale of his YouGov shares.

The shares, worth an estimated £27m, were held by Balshore Investments, a company registered offshore in Gibraltar linked to Mr Zahawi’s family.

Sky News understands that, as part of a settlement with HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC), Mr Zahawi paid a penalty to the tax collector.

Mr Sunak ordered an investigation by Sir Laurie Magnus, his independent adviser on ministers’ interests, into whether Mr Zahawi broke ministerial rules over the estimated £4.8m bill he apparently settled with HMRC while he was chancellor.

Who is Nadhim Zahawi?

The PM told MPs that while it would have been “politically expedient” to sack Mr Zahawi, “due process” meant that the investigation into his tax affairs should be allowed to reach its conclusion.

Mr Zahawi said HMRC concluded there had been a “careless and not deliberate” error in the way the shares had been treated and has insisted he is “confident” and has “acted properly throughout”.

However on Sunday, the PM sacked Mr Zahawi as Tory party chairman after the inquiry into the handling of his tax affairs found a “serious breach” of the ministerial code.

Seatbelt fine

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‘I regret not wearing a seatbelt’

Mr Sunak was given a fixed penalty notice after being caught not wearing a seatbelt.

Lancashire Police issued the notice after the prime minister appeared without a belt in a clip on Instagram as he promoted his levelling-up funding policies in the county.

Mr Sunak accepted the fine. Fines of up to £500 can be issued for failing to wear a seatbelt when one is available.

In a statement, Number 10 said: “The prime minister fully accepts this was a mistake and has apologised. He will of course comply with the fixed penalty.”

After being issued with the fixed penalty notice, Mr Sunak became the second serving prime minister – after Mr Johnson – to be found to have broken the law while in office.

Like Mr Johnson, he has previously been fined by the Met Police for breaking lockdown rules.

After the seatbelt fine, Labour said the prime minister has been turned into a “laughing stock”.

Multiple U-turns

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Has the PM made a U-turn on onshore wind farms?

Within the first three months of his premiership, Mr Sunak has also been forced to carry out a series of U-turns to appease Conservative backbench MPs.

Mandatory housebuilding targets were ditched following pressure from the PM’s own side.

Facing a rebel amendment from around 30 Tory MPs – including former PMs Boris Johnson and Liz Truss – Mr Sunak also U-turned over a ban on onshore wind by saying turbines could be installed if the projects gain the support of local communities.

Mr Sunak’s line that he would not attend the COP27 climate summit in Egypt due to “pressing domestic commitments” was also reversed following outrage from environmental campaigners – with COP26 President Alok Sharma saying he was “pretty disappointed” by the prime minister’s original decision, and the PM ultimately giving way to pressure to attend.

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Video emerges of aid workers being fired on in Gaza – contradicting Israeli account of deadly attack

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Video emerges of aid workers being fired on in Gaza - contradicting Israeli account of deadly attack

Footage has emerged of the moment 15 aid workers were killed in Gaza last month – showing their ambulances and fire insignia were clearly visible when Israeli troops are believed to have opened fire on them.

The bodies of 15 aid workers – eight medics working for the Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS), six civil defence members, and one United Nations employee – were found in a “mass grave” after the incident, according to the head of the UN Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs Jonathan Whittall.

The Israeli military said it is investigating – claiming before the video came to light that its initial inquiry found its troops opened fire on vehicles without headlights or emergency signals, which therefore looked “suspicious”. It also says there was an evacuation order in place in the area at the time of the incident.

But video footage obtained by the PRCS – and verified by Sky News – shows ambulances and a fire vehicle clearly marked with flashing red lights.

The three vehicles are seen with red flashing lights in the footage
Image:
Vehicles are seen with red flashing lights in the footage

Sky News has used aftermath video and satellite imagery to verify the location and timing of the footage.

It was filmed on 23 March north of Rafah. It shows a convoy of marked ambulances and a fire-fighting vehicle travelling south along a road towards central Rafah. All of the vehicles visible in the convoy have their flashing lights on.

It was filmed early in the morning, with a satellite image seen by Sky News taken at 9.48am local time on the same day showing a group of vehicles bunched together off the road.

The PRCS first posted about losing contact with its crews just before 7am local time.

Satellite imagery shows the area on 26 March, three days later. Tyre tracks are visible, as are groundworks likely created by military vehicles.

Pic: Planet Labs PBC
Image:
Pic: Planet Labs PBC

The footage is first filmed from inside a moving vehicle, through the windscreen a convoy of vehicles is visible – including ambulances and a fire truck with flashing emergency signal lights.

When the convoy stops, a vehicle is seen having veered off the road to the left-hand side.

The vehicle where the video is being filmed from stops and the aid workers get out. Intense gunfire then breaks out and continues for around five minutes.

The paramedic filming the video is heard saying in Arabic that there are Israelis present – and reciting a declaration of faith used before someone dies.

Hebrew voices are also heard in the background but it is not clear what they are saying.

Stills from video footage shows a Red Crescent symbol on the back of one of the vehicles
Image:
The footage was filmed from a moving vehicle

Israel conducting ‘thorough examination’

In a fresh statement on Saturday, the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) said the incident is “under thorough examination”.

“All claims, including the documentation circulating about the incident, will be thoroughly and deeply examined to understand the sequence of events and the handling of the situation,” it added.

In its statement on Saturday, the PCRS said the clip was “found on the phone of martyred EMT Rif’at Radwan, after his body was recovered” and that it “clearly shows that the ambulances and fire trucks they were using were visibly marked, with flashing emergency lights on at the time they were attacked”.

“This video unequivocally refutes the occupation’s claims that Israeli forces did not randomly target ambulances, and that some vehicles had approached ‘suspiciously without lights or emergency markings’,” it added.

‘They should have been protected’

Speaking at the United Nations on Friday, PRCS president Dr Younis Al Khatib said the organisation has “asked for an independent investigation”.

He added: “Something I can release, I heard the voice of one of those kids. I heard the voice of one of those team members who was killed and his phone was found with his body and he recorded the whole event.

“His last words before being shot, ‘Forgive me, mom. I just wanted to help people. I wanted to save lives’.”

Pic: Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS)
Image:
Pic: Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS)

Dylan Winder, permanent observer of the International Federation of the Red Cross (IFRC) said it is “outraged at the deaths of eight medics from the Palestinian Red Crescent Society killed on duty in Gaza“.

“They were humanitarians. They wore emblems that should have been protected. Their ambulances were clearly marked, and they should have returned to their families. They did not,” he said.

“Even in the most complex conflict zones, there are rules. These rules of international humanitarian law could not be clearer: civilians must be protected, humanitarians must be protected, health services must be protected.”

In a statement issued before the footage of the incident emerged, the IDF said it condemned “the repeated use of civilian infrastructure by the terrorist organisations in the Gaza Strip, including the use of medical facilities and ambulances for terrorist purposes”.

It claimed that several members of the militant groups Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad were killed in the incident.

It did not comment directly on the deaths of the Red Crescent workers but later told the Reuters news agency it had allowed the bodies to be recovered from the area, which it described as an active combat zone.

The clip is filmed through a vehicle windscreen - with three red light vehicles visible in front
Image:
Fifteen people died in the incident on 23 March

Bodies found in ‘mass grave’

The bodies of the missing aid workers were found in sand in the south of the Gaza Strip in what Mr Whittall, called a “mass grave”, marked with the emergency light from a crushed ambulance.

He posted pictures and video of Red Crescent teams digging in the sand for the bodies and workers laying them out on the ground, covered in plastic sheets.

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Bodies of aid workers found in Gaza

Philippe Lazzarini, head of the UN agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA), said that the bodies had been “discarded in shallow graves” in what he called “a profound violation of human dignity”.

According to the UN, at least 1,060 healthcare workers have been killed in the 18 months since Israel launched its offensive in Gaza after Hamas fighters stormed southern Israel on 7 October 2023.

The UN is reducing its international staff in Gaza by a third because of safety concerns.

Palestinian health authorities say more than 50,000 people have been killed since Israel launched its campaign in Gaza in response to the 7 October assault, when Hamas militants crossed the border into southern Israel, killing more than 1,200 people, and taking some 250 hostage.

Gaza’s health ministry records do not distinguish between civilians and combatants.

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Hundreds of names removed from official Gaza war death list

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Hundreds of names removed from official Gaza war death list

Gaza’s health ministry has removed 1,852 people from its official list of war fatalities since October, after finding that some had died of natural causes or were alive but had been imprisoned.

The list of deaths currently stands at 50,609 following the removals. Gaza’s health ministry records do not distinguish between civilians and combatants.

Almost all of the names removed (97%) had initially been submitted through an online form which allows families to record the deaths of loved ones where the body is missing.

The head of the statistics team at Gaza’s health ministry, Zaher Al Wahidi, told Sky News that names submitted via the form had been removed as a precautionary measure pending a judicial investigation into each one.

“We realised that a lot of people [submitted via the form] died a natural death,” Mr Wahidi said. “Maybe they were near an explosion and they had a heart attack, or [living in destroyed] houses caused them pneumonia or hypothermia. All these cases we don’t [attribute to] the war.”

Others submitted via the form were found to be imprisoned or to be missing with insufficient evidence that they had died.

Some families submitting false claims, Mr Wahidi said, may have been motivated by the promise of government financial assistance.

It is the largest removal of names from the list since the war began, and comes after 1,441 names were removed between August and October – 54% of them originating in hospital morgue records rather than the online form.

chart

Mr Wahidi says his team audited the hospital data after receiving complaints from people who had ended up on the list despite being alive.

They found that hospital clerks, when operating without access to the central population registry and lacking full names or dates of birth for the dead, had marked the wrong people as dead in their records.

In total, 8% of people who were listed as dead in August have since been removed from the official death toll. Many of those may later be added back in, as the judicial investigations proceed.

‘It doesn’t look like manipulation’

Gabriel Epstein, a research assistant at US thinktank The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said there’s no reason to think the errors are the result of deliberate manipulation intended to inflate the share of women and children among the dead.

“If 90% of the removed entries were men aged 18-40, that would look like manipulation,” he said. “But it doesn’t look like that.”

Of those entries removed since the start of the war and whose demographic information was recorded, 41% are men aged 18 to 60, while 59% are women, children and elderly people.

By comparison, 44% of remaining deaths are working-age men. This means that the removals have had the effect of slightly reducing the share of women and children in the official list.

chart

Names were previously added to the list without verification

Until October, Mr Wahidi said, names submitted via the online form had been added to the official list of registered deaths before undergoing a judicial confirmation process.

The publication of unverified deaths submitted via the form had previously led to issues with the data, with 1,295 deaths submitted via the form being removed from the list prior to October. This included 474 people who were later added back again.

Sky News previously understood that names from the form were only published after undergoing judicial confirmation. However, Mr Wahidi says this practice only began in October.

“This does cause me to downgrade the quality of the earlier lists, definitely below where I thought they were,” said Professor Michael Spagat, chair of Every Casualty Counts, an independent civilian casualty monitoring organisation.

Read more:
Analysis: Gaza aid workers’ deaths
What happened to the ceasefire?

A Ministry of Health document from July 2024 confirms that names submitted through the online form were, at the time, included in the official fatality list before being verified.

These names “are initially included in the final count of martyrs, but verification procedures are undertaken afterward”, the document says.

“They basically said that they were posting these things provisionally pending investigation,” said Prof Spagat.

“There may have been literally zero people, including us, who actually absorbed this message, but they weren’t hiding it either.”

More than 1,200 Israelis have been killed in the 7 October attack and ensuing war.


The Data and Forensics team is a multi-skilled unit dedicated to providing transparent journalism from Sky News. We gather, analyse and visualise data to tell data-driven stories. We combine traditional reporting skills with advanced analysis of satellite images, social media and other open source information. Through multimedia storytelling we aim to better explain the world while also showing how our journalism is done.

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Global markets have given Trump a clear no-confidence vote – and his fickleness is making the problem worse

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Global markets have given Trump a clear no-confidence vote - and his fickleness is making the problem worse

Global financial markets gave a clear vote of no-confidence in President Trump’s economic policy.

The damage it will do is obvious: costs for companies will rise, hitting their earnings.

The consequences will ripple throughout the global economy, with economists now raising their expectations for a recession, not only in the US, but across the world.

Tariffs latest: FTSE 100 suffers biggest daily drop since COVID

Financial investors had been gradually re-calibrating their expectations of Donald Trump over the past few months.

Hopes that his actions may not match his rhetoric were dashed on Wednesday as he imposed sweeping tariffs on the US’ trading partners, ratcheting up protectionism to a level not seen in more than a century.

FILE PHOTO: U.S. President Donald Trump holds a "Foreign Trade Barriers" document as he delivers remarks on tariffs in the Rose Garden at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., April 2, 2025. REUTERS/Carlos Barria/File Photo
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On Wednesday, Donald Trump announced global tariffs, ratcheting up protectionism. Pic: Reuters

04 April 2025, Hesse, Frankfurt/Main: Stock exchange traders watch their monitors on the trading floor of the Frankfurt Stock Exchange while the display board with the Dax curve shows falling prices. US President Trump had issued a huge tariff package against trading partners around the world. The European Union and China have already announced countermeasures. Photo by: Arne Dedert/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images
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Traders at the Frankfurt stock exchange watched the DAX plummet on Friday. Pic: Picture-alliance/dpa/AP

Markets were always going to respond to that but they are also battling with another problem: the lack of certainty when it comes to Trump.

More on Donald Trump

He is a capricious figure and we can only guess his next move. Will he row back? How far is he willing to negotiate and offer concessions?

Read more:
No winners from Trump’s tariff gameshow
Trade war sparks ‘$2.2trn’ global sell-off

These are massive unknowns, which are piled on to uncertainty about how countries will respond.

China has already retaliated and Europe has indicated it will go further.

Aerial view of a ro-ro terminal for vehicle shipment in Yantai in eastern China's Shandong province, Thursday, April 3, 2025. (Chinatopix Via AP) CHINA OUT
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Vehicles destined for export, like these in Yantai in eastern China, face massive US tariffs. Pic: Chinatopix/AP

Cargo containers line a shipping terminal at the Port of Oakland on Thursday, April 3, 2025, in Oakland, Calif. (AP Photo/Noah Berger)
Image:
Container ports like Oakland in California might expect activity to fall. Pic: AP

That will compound the problems for the global economy and undoubtedly send shivers through the markets.

Much is yet to be determined, but if there’s one thing markets hate, it’s uncertainty.

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