So a Tory politician is paying less tax than he would if he lived in Britain? Hardly news. Most of us probably would if we could get away with it. And he might have been part of a few insider deals here and there? Also not news.
Tax avoidance is not the real scandal of Lord Ashcroft. Like the old proverb said, why should a man who lives by the banks of a river go thirsty? Nor is it that he seems to think that he's more at home in Belize than Britain. Would the Left criticise a black politician who said similar things about Trinidad or Barbados? A country that lives off foreign trade might do well to have a few foreigners in Parliament to tell them what it’s like over there.
Nor is it that the androids fronting the Tory party were so keen to accomodate his personal requirements, even to protesting ignorance of them. No surprises there. Do we think these people got rich by not lending a helping hand to a fellow millionaire in need?
Its not even that he promised to come back here only if the Tories win the election, implying that what he wants is for his friends to take over the government and change the laws in his favour. We've seen that before as well.
No, the real scandal is that the Tory frontmen seem not to have realised how out-of-order that looks to ordinary people. Even after they managed to get most of the popular blame for MPs expenses to stick to the government they blithely went down the Ashcroft’s garden path. Even though if he had paid the tax Cameron said he was going to pay he could have funded every last penny of the expenses for all the MPs of all the parties put together and had some left over for cocktails on the riverside terrace. They just don’t see what they look like. As out of touch as a family of dead sheep in a shut-down brewery with the lights out and the curtains drawn.