29 days to go - In which young Gideon buys a house. Then another one. Then makes a few quid!

08/04/15

Dear Claire

Do you know, I have such a long list of subjects to write about to you? I keep, however, pushing these subjects back by a day, because there are such rich pickings available once you start looking into Gideon’s background. It seems he’s quite a player behind the scenes!

On 17^th October 2010, young Gideon pronounced the following:

“Frankly, a welfare cheat is no different from someone who comes up and robs you in the street, it’s your money”

Well, not quite, Gideon. Someone that cheats on welfare may well be in fairly desperate circumstances. Admittedly, someone that robs you may be in the same circumstances, but the robbing bit can get very nasty. There are many differences, but let’s not dwell on those here, let’s just leave Gideon’s rapier-like  intellect to work those out.

 

In the meantime let’s consider Gideon’s property dealings:

Apr 1998         Buys family home in Notting Hill, London for £700,000

Jun 2000         Reportedly £150,000 left on the mortgage for this property.

Oct 2000         Re-mortgages London property for £620,000 so he can buy Cheshire property for £450,000

So far, no problem. But after this, it starts getting a bit murky.

May 2001        Elected in Tatton constituency in Cheshire. Tells Commons fees office that his Cheshire house is his second home, but that the mortgage is on his London home. He’s advised to claim mortgage interest on the mortgage for the London home, so this is designated as his second home. Now, did he claim interest for the whole mortgage in London, or just the £450,000 he borrowed to buy the Cheshire property? Seems he claimed for all the interest! When this came to light, he was ordered to pay back a paltry £5,000 of the over-claimed sum.

2003                Mortgages the Cheshire home for £449,995 and re-mortgages the London home for just under £200,000. Then he designates his Cheshire home his second home, thus enabling him to claim interest on the entire mortgage of just under £450,000. Neat eh?

2003-2009       Claims £100,000 in expenses for his Cheshire home.

June 2006       Sells his London home for £1,448,000 – a tidy profit of £748,000. Because this house is, at the time, designated as his main home, he pays not a penny of capital gains tax, thus avoiding a bill of some £300,000. Neater still, I’m sure you’ll agree. Subsequently buys another London home for £1.85m.

Even Cameron took his nose out of the trough for long enough to realise that this wasn’t really fair play, and has since stopped his MPs from doing this. Naturally a spokesman for Gideon stated “George has never switched designation for personal advantage.” And then the bit I really like: “'there has been absolutely no impropriety and any suggestion of such is wrong.”

Subsequently, our Gideon has sold the Cheshire home for approx £900,000 – a nice fat £450,000 profit. That’s after we, the taxpayer, have funded the mortgage on the Cheshire home to the tune of £1,900 every month! Nice work if you can get it!

Now, I’m no apologist for the Libdems, but when Nick Clegg made a profit of £38,750 on a home he’d claimed mortgage interest on as parliamentary expenses, he returned it to the Treasury.

Our slippery little Chancellor of the Exchequer has trousered a substantial £1.2million in profit from his property dealings, without paying a penny of capital gains tax.

As an aside, further proof, were it needed, of Gideon’s slipperiness came in 2008 when a complaint was upheld against him for failing to declare £500,000 of donations to his office in the Commons' register of interests.

Even Matthew Elliott, of right-wing pressure group the Taxpayers’ Alliance, urged the Chancellor to “do the right thing” by returning the profit made on the Cheshire home.

These bumper paydays for Gideon are mainly thanks to public cash used to pay interest on monthly payments for both these enviable properties.

To cap it all, when this story broke, it also became clear that Gideon has faced a Tory backlash over the huge sums he has made from renting out his London home while living in Downing Street!

Matthew Elliott said: “If an MP has sold a second home which was purchased with the aid of taxpayers’ money then it seems only fair that a proportionate chunk of the profit should go back to Exchequer.”

So if we remind ourselves of Gideon’s initial pronouncement:  

“Frankly, a welfare cheat is no different from someone who comes up and robs you in the street, it’s your money”

The average benefit fraud per benefit claimant is £59, a total of £1.2billion (0.7% of total benefits paid), even though Iain Duncan Smith once claimed it was 28%, but that’s the subject of another letter.

Claire: I know your formative years in politics were as a keen admirer and defender of George Osborne. How, in the light of all that has been revealed about Osborne’s shady dealings, do you have anything other than utter contempt for this wretched man?

Let’s give Labour’s John Mann the last word: “Osborne’s greed makes him unfit to govern”

Kind regards

Polly