If David Cameron had a list of headlines he doesn’t want to see, I’m sure ‘Top Tory in expenses scandal’ would be near the top of it. Yet that’s what he, and we, will read this morning on the cover of the Sunday Times (£). The ‘Top Tory’ in question is Baroness Warsi, co-chairman of the party. And her offence, apparently, is to have claimed expenses for overnight accommodation while staying for free in a friend’s house.
Warsi has more or less denied the accusation, saying that she did stay at the property on ‘occasional nights’ as the guest of a party official — but made an ‘appropriate payment equivalent to what I was paying at the time in hotel costs’. The owner of the property, however, tells the Sunday Times that he saw none of this money from either Warsi or the party official. It’s all a bit muddy, really. No wonder Labour are now calling for a Parliamentary investigation to clarify it all.
And that’s not all. Warsi has ‘fessed up to something else that has emerged from the Sunday Times’s work: a flat that she was renting out didn’t make it on to the Register of Lords’ Interests, for which she takes ‘full responsibility’. But she adds that she did declare it to both the Cabinet Office and HMRC — such that it was recorded on the Register of Ministers’ Interests — and ‘twas only an ‘oversight’ that prevented it from going on the Lords list too. So, in terms of dangerous potential, this one appears less serious than the first of the Sunday Times’s revelations.
My guess is that Cameron will wait for any investigations to unfurl themselves before ruling on Warsi — much as he’s doing for Jeremy Hunt. But surely he’ll know how damaging all this might be for him in the meantime. It’s not so much the headlines in themselves, but the accumulation of them and the impression that they create. Before the election, Tory strategists regarded their man as the ‘clean break’ candidate. Now they fear that much of that image has been eroded. And, rightly or wrongly, today’s news won’t help.
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