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, I own no shares…’) were the equivalent of screaming ‘ATTENTION JOURNALISTS!!! HIDDEN STORY!!! LET THE GAME BEGIN!’ and beaming the words on to the Houses of Parliament with a Gail Porter-style projector. The golden rule of political crisis management is to make all of the information public at the very start: the drip-drip makes it look like there is a scandal, even when there isn’t.
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