Ashcroft anger turns on official as Tories snub meeting

I am in a select committee looking into Lord Ashcroft. No Tory MPs have turned up.

Labour peeress Brenda Dean who sat on the Honours Scrutiny Committee that first rejected then later approved Lord Ashcroft’s peerage said she has come “with a heavy heart” because of her “duty of confidentiality”…but she feels she ought to speak about Lord A because so much is in the public domain.

She says her committee didn’t impose a tax status on Lord A but thought he rather had imposed one on himself when his memorandum talking about “permanent residence” was sent to them by William Hague, then Tory leader.

“I’m no tax expert,” Brenda Dean said, and ain’t that the truth.

Sir Hayden Phillips, effectively “gatekeeper to the House of Lords” at the time in the committe’s words, has also said the same thing. That lack seems to lie at the heart of all this.

Ashcroft, in a hurry to get his just desserts in ermine, used a phrase with enormous tax implications which he was wise enough (and well advised enough) to extricate himself from in the succeeding months with no one else being sharp enough (or feeling they had the powers) to hold him to the tax commitment.

William Hague is still in difficulty about why he didn’t tell David Cameron straight away about Lord A’s non-dom tax status the moment he heard about it – likewise, Mr Cameron didn’t appear to have asked Lord A or gone public the moment he knew the man’s tax status.

But this committee doesn’t have them in front of them and is turning on Sir Hayden for not acting toughly enough in getting tax commitments from Lord A.

Sir Hayden is an icon of Whitehall Sir Humphrydom but a scalp of little wider significance.

The real ones, William Hague and Lord A, declined to appear in a letter sent by Sir George Young, Shadow Leader of the House.