The unanswered Ashcroft questions return

As soon as Nat Rothschild’s letter to The Times about George Osborne and Deripaska was published, it was obvious that it was only a matter of time before the Ashcroft issue got dragged into the spotlight again. Sure enough, today Rachel Sylvester devotes her column to Ashcroft’s tax and residency status.

There is no getting away from the fact that the questions about Ashcroft are legitimate. As Rachel points out,

“The Conservative Party has, however, already taken millions of pounds from a man who refuses to say whether he is resident and pays tax in this country…. The problem is that Lord Ashcroft, who grew up in Belize, refuses to declare publicly his tax and residency status. “It’s a private matter between him and Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs,” his spokesman told me yesterday. But it isn’t private – because it was a condition of his elevation to the House of Lords eight years ago that he would “take up permanent residence in the UK”. This isn’t just about ticking a bureaucrat’s box. The voters have a right to know whether a man who has a seat in Parliament has fulfilled the agreement that he made in order to get it.”

Lord Ashcroft appears to have no sinister motive in donating to the Conservative party. But the Tory party are still leaving themselves open to a political ambush by not resolving the issue surrounding his status once and for all. It would be foolhardy in the extreme for the Tories to go into a general election campaign unable to answer questions about the tax and residency status of one of their major donors and a deputy chairman of the party.