Why do lefties struggle to pay their taxes?
Zack Polanski is just the latest in a long line of leftwingers to find himself embroiled in a financial scandal, explains James Ford
Zack Polanski has been a naughty boy. No, I’m not referring to his recent dressing down by the Commissioner of the Met. Or even to the latest allegations that he has been embellishing his CV with false claims he was a spokesman for the British Red Cross and an employee at the Ministry of Justice. I am talking about the allegations that he may have underpaid his council tax when he was living on a canal boat in East London. It is one thing to earn the ire of London’s top cop, but it is another order of magnitude to have shortchanged HMRC. Hell hath no fury like a taxman scorned.
If this situation seems familiar – like we have all been here before – it is because we have. A fast-rising tribune of the people, prone to sermonising on the evils and inequities of wealth and beloved by the leftist legions, suddenly finds themselves accused of financial misconduct. It is what befell Angela Rayner last autumn just as she was ably positioning herself for a tilt at the Labour leadership. In fact, that tax scandal is still impacting her political progress as she is yet to receive the ‘all-clear’ from the tax authorities.
Not that Rayner invented the concept of lefties falling from grace after being accused of fiddling their finances. Before Rayner’s bush with the tax authorities, there were Liberal ministers indulging in insider trading in the Marconi Scandal in 1912, the fraudster and Labour MP John Stonehouse in 1974 who attempted to fake his own death, and all those former New Labour ministers caught trying to rent themselves out as lobbyists in the Dispatches ‘cash for influence’ scandal in 2010.
More recently, there was ‘freebie gate’, where many senior Cabinet ministers were revealed to have accepted generous gifts – designer glasses, free holidays, Taylor Swift tickets – from donors including peer Lord Alli. And let us not forget perhaps the master of the genre: Peter Mandelson. The first two of his high-profile resignations were prompted by his financial dealings with wealthy patrons. (Indeed, while it was Epstein’s conviction for sex offences that made him a highly unsuitable acquaintance for a serving Ambassador, it was his wealth that drew Mandy into his orbit in the first place). Indeed, the lefty dodgy money scandal is such a well-worn cliche that we might conclude that all left-wing politicians are using one hand to pick taxpayers’ pockets and the other hand lining their own.
The right gets in trouble for sex
By contrast, politicians of the right tend to get in trouble with their sex lives rather than over money. John Profumo was immortalised by the sex scandal that bore his name in 1963 (and which is often credited with bringing down the Conservative government in 1964). By the 1990s there were so many Conservative MPs being brought down by separate sex scandals – Steve Norris, David Mellor, Tim Yeo, Jerry Hayes, Stephen Milligan – that it all just merged under the general heading ‘Tory Sleave’.
Now, this is not exactly an iron rule. Plenty of left-wing politicos have been caught with their trousers down, and plenty of right-wingers have been caught with their hands in the till. (And an impressive number of all politicians from both sides of the aisle have been caught doing both). But the left/right split between financial scandals and sexual scandals is certainly a trend.
This trend is all about politicians pursuing in adulthood the things that they felt they had not had enough of in their youth. Whereas lefties politicians were more likely to have experienced poverty growing up, while right-wing politicians – who probably went to all-boys boarding schools – were much more likely to feel they had missed out on youthful exploits with the opposite sex
Why? It was once explained to me, as a newbie political adviser, that this trend was all about politicians pursuing in adulthood the things that they felt they had not had enough of in their youth. Whereas lefties politicians were more likely to have experienced poverty growing up, while right-wing politicians – who probably went to all-boys boarding schools – were much more likely to feel they had missed out on youthful exploits with the opposite sex. This latent susceptibility for a certain type of temptation is exacerbated by the gap between how left and right sermonise about wealth and family values respectively. The public might understand, even empathise with, temptation, but they have little time for hypocrites. It is not the sin that brings a politician down, it’s the double standard.
James Ford was an advisor to former Mayor of London Boris Johnson