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 matter’. The bitty statements and changes of tack that came over the following days shows that no-one in Downing Street really thought Cameron was in any danger. But that the Prime Minister had already decided yesterday that he would have to give a Commons statement on the matter shows that this view of the risk of the story to the Prime Minister has changed dramatically.
What is now giving it legs is not so much what Cameron did or didn’t reveal about his arrangement – though the inquiry by the standards committee into why he didn’t list his shares in Blairmore Holdings in the register of members’ interests will mean that today will not mark the end of Cameron’s problems – but the debate about whether all MPs should make their tax arrangements public. It has caused fury in some quarters, with Tory colleagues arguing that such a rule would breach their privacy. Other Tory MPs are delighted that Cameron is being humiliated in public, and see the tax row as just desserts for his behaviour in the EU referendum.
The Tory benches will probably be as fierce as the Labour ones this afternoon. But even if Cameron has a less brutal session than he might expect, and even if Jeremy Corbyn fails to lay a finger on him in the Commons, the way this row has handled means that today will not be the last day that it dominates the headlines.
Comments