Analysis: Will Ashcroft damage the Tories?

Monday, 1 March 2010 12:00 AM

The secrecy around Michael Ashcroft's tax status has damaged the Tories more than the status itself.

By Ian Dunt

The problem with the expenses scandal was that it didn't really remain the expenses scandal for very long. For many voters, it quickly transmuted into the 'Westminster corruption outrage' and plenty of other disgraces fell into its net.

Tax domicile status, party donations, the behaviour of peers in the House of Lords: these issues quickly became wrapped up in the narrative. Westminster had let us down. Politicians were motivated by power and the fine life rather than improving the country. The system was awash with money, and the rich had more access to power than the poor.

That's why today's revelation that Michael Ashcroft, Tory deputy chairman and personal cash machine to the party's campaign in marginal constituencies, is a non-dom could potentially cause the Conservatives a great deal of damage. It attaches the expenses cancer to the Tory brand, just before the election campaign.

Back in 2000, Lord Ashcroft only got his nomination for the Lords accepted by the political honours scrutiny committee after promising to become a permanent resident of the UK. There followed a particularly unattractive spectacle, as senior Tory figures evaded questions about his tax status for just over a decade. Today reveals why. Lord Ashcroft appears to have been moved to reveal his status not by ethics, but by Christopher Graham, the information commissioner who gave the Cabinet Office just 35 days to end the secrecy surrounding his tax status on February 1st this year.

The sense of cover-up - or at least lack of transparency - will damage the Tories more than the revelation of his non-dom status.

Cameron has taken a tough line on non-doms through George Osborne's much discussed levy, which was designed to fund the inheritance tax cut. That now seems fickle and fake when the party was refusing to be open about a non-dom in its midst, as it were. On a wider level, Cameron's tough, robust, swift action on expenses is now vulnerable.

His party was hugely implicated in the scandal, but his quick, intuitive response seemed to spare him much damage. The public treated the expenses scandal - rightly - as a Westminster problem. The three main parties breathed a sigh of relief that none of them were blamed in particular. In fact, all of them were implicated and condemned equally. That universal approach prevented Cameron getting much traction from the scandal. But today's revelation could, in the worst-case scenario, attach the whiff of corruption to his party's brand above Labour or the Lib Dems.

Labour could be in trouble too, of course. After all, the party had two non-doms - Lord Paul and Sir Ronald Cohen - as donors. But the difference is both have been open about that fact for some time now. The decade of mystery and suspicion that has settled around Lord Ashcroft's status makes today's events much more damaging to the Conservatives than his actual status itself is.

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