No one voted for David Cameron under the illusion that he was poor. The Eton schooling, the swanky pad in west London, the distant cousinage to the Queen — none of it was a secret, although there was a coy period, before he became prime minister, when he declined black-tie invitations and banned champagne flutes from Tory conference.
He needn’t have bothered. Poshness was part of the package.
The published summary of Cameron’s tax return adds detail but not depth to his public image. The prime minister’s wealth can now be calibrated to more decimal places, but the numbers are not as damaging as his more excitable critics wish they would be. He earns a whole lot more than most people, but he also does a bigger job than most.
The pitch of potential outrage can be tuned up an octave with objections about unearned windfalls: rent on a London property worth millions; shares in a Panama-based fund that were sold on the eve of accession to No 10; a £200,000 (Dh1.04 million) gift from Mum that looks like a circumvention of inheritance tax.
If none of that rankles, maybe apathetic ears will prick up at the whistle of hypocrisy. Didn’t Cameron once describe as “morally wrong” legal measures that celebrities took to minimise their tax liabilities? He must now regret blundering into the ethical question of when a fair contribution to the exchequer is greater than the amount someone can legally get away with (not) paying.
The line is not fixed. Most people put themselves on the right side of it while presuming that anyone much wealthier, and with more complex arrangements, has crossed into the shady zone.
Jeremy Corbyn accurately summarised public crossness about the Panama Paper revelations with the observation that there appears to be “one rule for the rich, one rule for the rest”.
The Labour leader enjoys a rare advantage in this argument. His personal integrity is not doubted even by people who disagree with his politics. No one thinks Corbyn is in it for the money. He is well placed to channel public suspicion that a wealthy prime minister and chancellor might lack urgency when it comes to cleaning up the tax affairs of an opulent caste that funds their election campaigns, and whose company they keep.
But there is also a trap for Labour. This line of attack is not new. Every conceivable punch that might be aimed at the Tories over financial favours, dodgy donors and aristo-arrogance has been thrown since Cameron became leader, and still he is standing.
It started in 2008 when Labour dispatched a top-hatted rent-a-toff to trail the Conservative candidate in the Crewe and Nantwich by-election, and lost the seat on a massive swing.
When George Osborne cut the top rate of income tax, Ed Miliband taunted the Tory front bench in parliament by inviting those who would personally benefit from the perk to raise their hands. He was still denouncing the “tax cut for millionaires” three years later.
Every day during the last parliament, Labour press officers dispatched new evidence to show how the government was “out of touch”. Every budget cut heralded the return of the “nasty party”. Every episode of swagger by Cameron in the House Commons was diagnosed as a fatal slip of the prime minister’s mask.
The Tories still won the election, not because British voters were hoodwinked into thinking he was a humble man of modest means but because enough of them didn’t care how posh he was when the alternative was putting Labour in charge of the country.
The Conservatives’ perennial weakness is a reputation for hardheartedness and exclusivity, which creates the impression of a party that funnels favours to the rich at the expense of everyone else. But if those were the only factors, the electoral waters would long ago have closed over Cameron’s head.
He has survived because competence is a more cherished quality in a leader than compassion. His greatest political gift is the ability to look sure-footed on thin ice. He has only ever looked vulnerable during bouts of administrative ineptitude or when civil strife in his own party strips away the pretence of control.
Even with his tax statement, more damage was done by incoherent messages and caginess ahead of publication than was inflicted by the data once it was released. But, since competence is a primary virtue in politics, Corbyn’s attack was blunted by his difficulty in locating his own tax return and the revelation that it had been filed late, incurring a £100 fine. The episode plays to an unfortunate stereotype of the bien-pensant, metropolitan lefty: enthusiastic about taxation in principle; not so sharp on money matters in practice.
Meanwhile, Labour is in danger of over-interpreting events of the past week as signs of a shifting tide that leaves the Tories beached on the wrong side of some grander argument. Public resentment of a super-rich class that skimps on its taxes doesn’t indicate any new enthusiasm on the part of anyone else for paying more. Nor does it yet prove that extremes of inequality are changing the political climate.
The left naturally wants the existence of a privileged elite, free-riding on the hard work and contributions of everyone else, to be of critical urgency for every voter. Most Labour MPs consider the case for radical economic realignment long-since proven. Too much wealth and opportunity are hoarded by the few.
The injustices are baked in: an army of insecure, badly housed, poorly paid workers toil without hope of matching the lifestyle of older homeowners with safe jobs and protected pensions, who pass lavish advantage on to their children. The chancellor’s austerity programme cynically accelerates those trends where they align with his party’s electoral interests.
So axiomatic is that analysis inside Labour that the leadership hardly bothers to unpack it for a wider audience, as if the rottenness of the system and its organic connection to Conservative doctrine are self-evident.
But the lesson of the Miliband years is that public mistrust of rich Tories doesn’t automatically rehabilitate confidence in Labour.
And the lesson of the past week is that the prime minister is more vulnerable on incompetence than on income tax.
— Guardian News & Media Ltd, 2016
Rafael Behr is a political columnist for the Guardian. He has been political editor of the New Statesman, chief leader writer on the Observer and a foreign correspondent for the Financial Times in Russia and eastern Europe.
