David Cameron’s failure to confront his party’s most generous benefactor over his tax status, and his implicit cover-up of the facts, exposes yet again his judgement, his leadership and his shallow respect for the British people. Why was he too afraid to ask Michael Ashcroft the direct question? Was he foolish enough to think, and did he have so little consideration for the public’s right to know, that the truth should, or could, be hidden through a general election?
That he, or his predecessor William Hague, whose patronage ensured Lord Ashcroft’s peerage, were simply gullible stretches belief. As Lord Tebbit put it: “It would have been better if Ashcroft said what we now know years ago.”
For years, Lord Ashcroft allowed people to believe that he had changed his tax status in line with the assurances he gave in order to secure his peerage when in fact he hadn’t. His emphatic silence throughout testifies to the fact that he knew he was not playing straight with the Government, Parliament, his own party or the electorate. Wanting it both ways, he was prepared to claim domiciled status to attain and retain his peerage but non-domiciled status to avoid paying taxes in the country whose political affairs he is in a position to preside over.
This is a man who has been prepared to have as decisive an influence as possible over which government we have but was unprepared to pay the taxes that should have been due to the Exchequer. A man who is prepared to bankroll a party set on savage cuts in the living standards, job prospects, education and health of people and a country for which he has displayed a contemptuous and cynical disrespect.
Far from censuring Lord Ashcroft and ordering him to put his affairs in order – as he did with Zac Goldsmith, the Tory candidate for Richmond who was also revealed to be a non-dom – David Cameron merely says it is right that the air has been cleared and expects to draw a line swiftly under the affair. That should not be allowed to happen. When the Electoral Commission ruled that Lord Ashcroft was free to channel funds from overseas into the British political system, it exposed the inadequacy of the present rules.
There is no honour in the coincidence of gaining a peerage and being a donor, non-dom, or not, to a political party. Labour peer Lord Paul went some way to addressing his own status by declaring that he would pay full taxes in future. While he and other donors are not directly influencing policy and, unlike Lord Ashcroft, are not at the heart of the party machine, they represent a discredited system of party financing which must be changed and better regulated. Yet it is the Tories, in another act of hypocrisy, which blocked all party talks on reform because they wanted to cut off union funding of Labour – the most transparent and regulated of any form of political donations.
If Michael Ashcroft is the unacceptable face of the Tory Party, David Cameron has proved once again that he is its deeply flawed leader.
