David cameron

Monday

James Forsyth

Has David Cameron’s tax debacle united the Tories?

Yet again, David Cameron has reason to be grateful for the quality of the opposition facing him. First of all, Jeremy Corbyn took until Cameron’s statement to release his own tax return, meaning that journalists were studying that as much as his response in the House of Commons. Second, Corbyn’s own response was long on verbiage but failed to ask any difficult questions of Cameron. Finally, Dennis Skinner had John Bercow order him from the chamber for refusing to withdraw his use of the word ‘dodgy’ about Cameron, which rather reinforced the point that the case against Cameron is long on name-calling and short on specifics. Cameron himself came armed

Steerpike Steerpike

Watch: Dennis Skinner ejected from Commons over ‘dodgy Dave’ insult

This afternoon David Cameron has had to face the music in the Commons over his shares in his father’s offshore fund. While he received a lukewarm response from his own party, the most hostile response came from the Beast of Bolsover. After Cameron gave an address on his tax affairs, Dennis Skinner angrily responded by calling the Prime Minister ‘dodgy Dave’: ‘At the time when he was dividing the nation between striders and scroungers, I asked him a very important question about the windfall he received when he wrote off the mortgage of the premises in Notting Hill, and I said he didn’t write off the mortgage of the one the taxpayers were helping to

Tom Goodenough Tom Goodenough

Osborne and Corbyn publish their tax returns – but are they any more interesting than the PMs?

George Osborne and Jeremy Corbyn have now both followed in the Prime Minister’s footsteps by publishing details of their tax returns. As James Forsyth said on our Spectator podcast earlier today, it was just a matter of time before the Chancellor and Labour leader bowed down to pressure. But what do the two documents actually tell us? The simple answer is that Osborne and Corbyn’s tax returns make for even less interesting reading than David Cameron’s. Properly speaking, Osborne’s isn’t even a tax return at all but rather a summary of the main bits. It shows his earnings as Chancellor; it also appears to show that he isn’t putting any

Tom Goodenough Tom Goodenough

The Coffee House podcast: David Cameron’s tax headache

David Cameron has bowed down to pressure by publishing his tax return and now the Chancellor has done the same. But where will the calls for financial transparency end? And how did this issue blow up into such a big political row? Spectator editor Fraser Nelson joins Isabel Hardman and James Forsyth to talk about the Prime Minister’s tax headache. Speaking on the podcast, James Forsyth says the whole topic shows Downing Street is so fixated on Europe that it has taken an eye off the ball. He tells Fraser: ‘I think what is going on is this: Europe is totally and utterly distracting Downing Street from everything else. This

Steerpike Steerpike

Has Jeremy Corbyn lost his tax return?

Oh dear. Although Jeremy Corbyn spent the best part of last week calling on David Cameron to publish his tax return, the Labour leader appears to be struggling to follow his own advice. Despite Corbyn promising to publish his tax return last Tuesday, the document is yet to see the light of day. Rather than a tax evasion conspiracy, it’s thought that Corbyn simply can’t find it; with some outlets reporting that he has had to ask HMRC to send him a copy.  However, the Leader’s Office dispute this — they insist that it will be published soon. So as things stand, we have a Prime Minister for whom the Panama Papers have turned into

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Cameron’s handling of the tax row means it won’t go away any time soon

David Cameron will give a statement in the Commons addressing the row about his tax arrangements, with George Osborne expected to publish his own tax return in the coming days too. That the Prime Minister has had to prepare a statement for MPs so that he can avoid being hauled to the Commons by Labour with an urgent question shows both how serious this row is for Cameron, but also how he is trying to compensate for being unprepared last week. He had clearly underestimated how potent the revelations in the Panama Papers would be, thinking that they could be dismissed with a mere line about this being a ‘private

Sunday

Fraser Nelson

David Cameron’s tax returns tell us nothing. So why did he publish them?

It’s just as well that David Cameron abandoned his career in public relations because he seems to be comically (or, if you’re a journalist, deliciously) bad at crisis management. He has done absolutely nothing wrong, but is carrying on as if he’s Ken Dodd in 1989 – except Dodd handled it all more deftly. The Prime Minister has now released six years of his tax returns, which is odd because no one is asking questions about his income over the last six years. But still, he wants to tell us about the £100k annual rent he’s getting form his Notting Hill flat and the £3,052 of bank interest (which suggests a balance of

Friday

Steerpike

Lily Allen in a spin over David Cameron’s offshore trust stake

Oh dear. David Cameron’s bad day just got worse. After he admitted to previously owning shares in his father’s offshore fund, he has faced calls to resign. Now Lily Allen has promised to pay him a visit. The Smile singer says she will be heading to No.10  tomorrow to take part in a protest calling for Cameron to resign. The news will no doubt come as a blow to the Prime Minister given that he previously claimed Allen’s music was unsuitable listening material for his children. Making clear her opposition to Cameron, Allen claimed on Twitter that he has been ‘stealing’ from the public and needs to resign: Our Prime Minister has been stealing from us. It's

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

David Cameron is guilty of bad spin – and nothing more

At last! We can now see why David Cameron tried to keep this quiet. He sold his shares in January 2010 – just as the recovery was starting. What a dunce! His £31,500 would be worth a lot more by now if he’d held, and diversified his portfolio. So can you trust him with the nation’s finances? And this, as far as I can make out, is the limit of the scandal. All else is spin and smear. The spin, of course, matters. The Prime Minister has behaved as if he had something to hide when he didn’t. His carefully-worded highly-specific non-denial denials (‘In terms of my own financial affairs,

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

The government has returned to a period of omnishambles

You can tell a lot about how a party’s press operation thinks things are going from who it sends out to do its dirty work on the airwaves. Yesterday the Conservatives sent Michael Fallon out to defend the Government’s £9m pro-EU leaflet, which suggested that they knew it was going to be controversial and would need defending by someone skilled at sticking to the line, even when the line is totally untenable and difficult to defend. Today, Nick Boles popped up on Radio 4 to defend David Cameron’s eventual admission that he had indeed made money from the offshore fund set up by his father. The Skills Minister had been

Tom Goodenough Tom Goodenough

‘Cameron comes clean’: Newspapers savage PM after offshore tax confession

This morning’s newspapers were never going to make enjoyable reading for the Prime Minister following his admission yesterday that he owned shares in an offshore trust. But David Cameron may still not have been quite prepared for the focus with which the headlines go after him. He has experienced bad newspaper headlines before, of course, but this is the first time the attacks have focused so specifically on him, rather than on a policy introduced by the Government. It’s hard to feel sorry for Cameron, though. By dragging the story out with statements that raised more questions than they answered, he only has himself to blame for whipping this up into

Thursday

Toby Young

A big hand for the two-faced tax hacks

Something odd happened at the Guardian after the paper’s editorial staff were basking in the glow of their just-published splash about the Panama papers. They were understandably excited, having sat on the revelations for months, and were about to put flesh on the bones of the stories that had broken on Sunday evening about the elaborate tax-avoidance schemes of assorted Tory bigwigs. The Guardian was one of 107 media organisations that had been secretly going through the cache of 11.5 million documents stolen from the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca and these were the golden nuggets: disclosures guaranteed to cause the government maximum embarrassment and — an added bonus —

The Spectator

The road to Panama

The 11 million documents leaked from Panama lawyers Mossack Fonseca tell us much that we know already. It’s hardly news that the Central American state is a popular destination for those who dislike paying tax. But to obsess about this aspect of the story, as so many did this week, would be to miss the most striking discovery, which is just how many politicians and government officials have been using Panama to disguise their extraordinary wealth. Few were under any illusions about Vladimir Putin being a good and faithful public servant, yet it comes as a surprise that he appears to have a personal fortune that would have made the

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

David Cameron defends £9m spend on EU leaflets

David Cameron has defended the £9m government leaflet promoting the EU as ‘money well spent’ and ‘necessary’, as the Tory party erupts into fury once again. What’s interesting about this new row – over a leaflet sent to all homes which sets out ‘why the Government believes that voting to remain in the European Union is the best decision for the UK’ – is that it has incensed not just those usual suspects who are annoyed that the Remain side already has a natural advantage in the referendum campaign in that it can wheel out the Prime Minister for guaranteed media attention whenever it likes. MPs who are on the

Steerpike Steerpike

David Cameron claims he watches Glastonbury at home by a warm fire… in June

Today David Cameron is trying to win the youth vote in the upcoming EU referendum. To do this, he has given a speech to students at Exeter University — claiming that young people will be be hit hardest in the event of Brexit. Taking questions from the audience after his speech, one student pointed out that it may be difficult for many youngsters to vote given that the referendum clashes with Glastonbury. Answering the question, Cameron attempted to get the crowd on side by confessing that he too loves the music festival. However, rather than attend the lively festivities, he makes sure he watches it ‘at home in front of a warm fire’. However,

Wednesday

Isabel Hardman

The Tories should have known the taxing questions were coming

Downing Street has spent the past 24 hours trying to clarify David Cameron’s links to an offshore fund set up by his late father, which never paid tax in Britain. Initially, Downing Street said this was a ‘private matter’, Cameron was then asked about the matter, and said ‘I own no shares, no offshore trusts, no offshore funds, nothing like that. And, so that, I think, is a very clear description.’ Then Downing Street issued a statement saying ‘to be clear, the Prime Minister, his wife and their children do not benefit from any offshore funds’. And today Number 10 had to clarify further: ‘There are no offshore funds/trusts which

Saturday

James Forsyth

Why has the government been so behind the curve on steel?

This hasn’t been a good week for the government. As I say in my Sun column today, it has been oddly off the pace in its response to Tata’s decision to sell off its UK steel plants. We have had the absurd sight of the Business Secretary flying to Australia and then turning round and coming back again. What makes all this so odd is that everyone knew that Tuesday’s meeting of the Tata board was key to the future of these plants. Government insiders say that the government being caught on the hop is another example of how Number 10’s obsession with the EU referendum means that it is

Thursday

The Spectator

Power failure | 31 March 2016

A fortnight ago, the energy minister, Andrea Leadsom, declared grandly that Britain, alone in the world, would commit to a target of reducing net carbon emissions to zero. ‘The question is not whether but how we do it,’ she told Parliament. It is now becoming painfully clear how this target will be reached: not by eliminating our carbon emissions but by exporting them, along with thousands of jobs and much of our manufacturing industry. This week, Tata Steel announced that its entire UK business is to be put up for sale. That came after Stephen Kinnock, whose South Wales constituency includes Tata’s giant plant at Port Talbot, joined a union

The Spectator

The Spectator podcast: Eugenics, Tory wars and poetry

We’re delighted to have Berry Bros sponsor our flagship podcast. For some years now their ‘Good Ordinary Claret‘ has been The Spectator’s house red, served to all our guests (who are always impressed).  It’s just £9 a bottle. Lara Prendergast presents this week’s podcast. She speaks to Fraser Nelson about the return of eugenics – which, according to his cover article, is back with a vengeance. He’s alarmed – but Toby Young isn’t. He says eugenics should be on the NHS so the poor can have more intelligent babies. Next, James Forsyth discusses the latest in the Tory wars over Brexit. With mounting tensions in the party amid a possible leadership battle, James says this ‘bitter contest could release as much poison as

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Can anyone stop Boris?

Most MPs greet the parliamentary recess with a sense of relief. But Conservatives are welcoming this Easter break like the bell at the end of a boxing match. They are exhausted, tempers must be cooled and they now have a fortnight to think about how best to stop their split over the EU referendum becoming something more permanent and debilitating. Some in the party have long hated their own colleagues more than anyone else ,and they have taken full advantage of the excuse the referendum offers for verbal violence. As one Cabinet minister admits: ‘The extreme 10 per cent on either side of the Tory party absolutely loathe each other.’