ANALYSIS:David Laws's expenses claim left him exposed and, consequently, open to charges of hypocrisy
UNDER BRITISH prime minister David Cameron and his deputy Nick Clegg’s “new politics” in the UK all was to be shiny and bright, filled with the ideals of public service and brimming with austere probity.
The image has suffered a damaging blow following chief secretary to the treasury David Laws’s resignation on Saturday after it emerged he had claimed for £40,000 (€47,000) of accommodation bills from 2004 paid to his male lover, James Lundie.
Mr Laws, an intensely private man, had not wanted to “out” himself as a homosexual. But by claiming the money he left himself with a judgment to be made in time by the Parliamentary Standards Commissioner. His position as second-in-command to chancellor of the exchequer George Osborne in reality meant he was the lead figure in the spending cuts to come.
His claims for rent were modest, never more than £950 a month, although the bills for his share of utility bills dropped dramatically once the House of Commons’ Fees Office started looking for receipts.
Under parliamentary rules changed in 2006, an MP cannot claim if they are living with a spouse, or partner – and a partner is described as “one of a couple . . . who although not married to each other or civil partners are living together and treat each other as spouses”.
Laws, who first shared with Lundie in 1991 and who began a relationship with him three years later, denies he is covered by this description.
He had not revealed Lundie as his partner because he did not want to reveal his sexuality, although this fact was not unknown to many in the Commons and in his constituency ever before his elevation to the front rank of politics.
“My motivation throughout has not been to maximise profit but to simply protect our privacy and my wish not to reveal my sexuality,” said Laws in the treasury on Saturday evening, the very same venue where he had dazzled the press just a week before with his command of intricate detail and where he had overshadowed his Conservative colleague.
Laws’s defence that he has not broken the rules because he and Lundie are not “a couple” hardly stands up, since the two men have been lovers since 2001 and Laws increased the mortgage on his home in Somerset to help Lundie buy the London property, while British law would give either of them a hold on the other’s assets given that they have been together so long.
Most significantly, Laws stands accused of hypocrisy, since he was not slow to compare his admittedly-low expense claim with those made by others, with one entry on his website boasting that he had had the “second lowest claim for London living costs of the 17 MPs for the Somerset and Dorset area – last year he spent just £15,962 out of the permitted budget of £24,006.
“While many MPs have claimed the maximum ‘second homes’ allowance each year, David has under-claimed on this allowance by £29,500 since his election in 2001.
“He has never changed the designation of his main home or ‘flipped’ this designation for financial benefit.”
It adds: “David does not own a property in London – he rents a home in London so he can be in the capital when parliament is sitting . . . He has done nothing to avoid any tax liabilities.”
His 17-day tenure in the treasury, where he had gone from being an unknown nationally to one worthy of cartoon status, was doomed from the moment the first edition of the Daily Telegraphfront page started to circulate late on Friday night.
Wealthy from his career in the City before entering politics, Laws’s resignation wounds the new government since he enjoyed the confidence of the Liberal Democrats’ coalition partners, the Conservatives.
Osborne had wanted a Liberal Democrat in the treasury so the Lib Dems would share responsibility for the cuts to come. Indeed the chancellor had congratulated himself on getting Laws.
But Laws was no reluctant recruit to the treasury. He wanted to go there and believed the proposed cuts were necessary.
Tory gloom at his passing was illustrated over the weekend by one senior Conservative party cabinet minister after another coming out to express sadness at his departure from cabinet.
Laws’s resignation points up one of the problems with the construction of the coalition: that some jobs have to go to Liberal Democrats for the sake of government cohesion.
Laws did much in his short few days to establish the coalition’s credibility with the public, which knows in its hearts that tough medicine is ahead, but which will be resistant once the detail is revealed.
He has been replaced by Scottish Liberal Democrat MP Danny Alexander who wrote the party’s election manifesto and is extremely close to Clegg, but does not have Laws’s financial background.
However, the Laws affair creates nervousness that the Liberal Democrats – who have never been subjected to the kind of scrutiny faced by the Conservatives and Labour – may have other sins.
In its exposure last year of MPs' expenses, the Daily Telegraphkept back some material for a rainy day, as it were; or because some of the people were not then worth bothering with.
The fear now in the British government is that some of them are now worth bothering by the Telegraphand that Laws's problems may be but the herald of other difficulties to come.