The Elephantine skin of David Cameron

I’ve just been reading a transcript of the Prime Minister of Great Britain talking about the tax avoidance of comedian Jimmy Carr. If anyone needed any further evidence, then this transcript is the clincher: David Cameron is an arrogant, amoral idiot. Forget his excellent First at Oxford. There is no correlation at all between IQ and fitness for moral and administrative leadership.

The bottom line is that Scameron said two things. First, he thought Carr’s avoidance was “inexcusable”. And secondly, he thought the practice used by the comic was “morally repugnant, while entirely legal”. Earlier – some six weeks go – Call me Dave also said he did “not want anyone avoiding tax in this way in his social circle”.

Right, let’s get straight down to this. Jeremy Hunt is in his f**king Cabinet, let alone his social circle. Last year, Hunt avoided £250,000 of tax by exploiting a tax loophole on office property ownership. In his defence of the entirely indefensible ‘Culture’ Secretary, Cameron has carefully ignored this obvious clash with what he claims are his ‘principles’.

But like many a nob before him, Dave is a brass-necked chancer. So having got away with Hunt hypocrisy, the PM now feels secure enough to double his ignominy by daring to have a go at Jimmy Carr. And just to go for the full daft Monty, David Cameron covers his pristine pert bottom by adding “entirely legal” to his storm of abuse about Carr’s behaviour being “totally wrong” and the avoidance scheme “dodgy”.

So then, morally repugnant and entirely legal: and who is the top legislator in the UK?

I hold no brief for Jimmy Carr. I think he’s something of a one-trick pony (tasteless gags) and the laugh he affects on his various panel Game Shows I find incredibly irritating. But I’ll tell you something Carr doesn’t do: he doesn’t employ armies of sociopathic tax accountants using “dodgy” loopholes and sleazy Inland Revenue backdoor deals to get his tax rate down to 7% on average.

Whereas every last UK-based multinational does exactly that.

As for the Cameron v Carr bout as a narrower issue however, I had difficulty getting my breath when I read the transcript of the Cameron interview. For the first time in my life, I experienced the cliche ‘breathtaking nerve’ personally. Hunt is a Minister of the Crown whose specialism is making everyone angry. Carr is a stand-up who, by and large, relieves the tension by making people laugh. Let’s get real shall we on the amount of acceptable behaviour expected of the taxpayer concerned.

But there is another issue which simply is not being addressed by the MSM. TNS-BMRB’s latest UK opinion poll, conducted last weekend, had the Conservatives on 32%, and Labour on 40%. (The week before, the gap between the two was 3% wider). The fact is that the media – especially the BBC, which is supposed to be a warren of covert Stalinists – are massively out of tune with the public in not giving our Prime Minister a much, much harder time.

Let me give you the Oxford dictionary definition of ‘repugnant’: extremely distasteful, unacceptable, in conflict or incompatible’.

It would be hard to find a better description of David Cameron’s ‘make it up as you go along’ moral code than that one.

I rest my case beyond saying this: if as a Slogger you agree generally with this view, could you please bombard the Number Ten website demanding to know the difference between Jeremy Hunt and Jimmy Carr.

Footnote: As is the case with tax avoidance in Greece, Italy and Spain, perhaps if Brits felt that £2 in £5 of tax take going completely to waste on hubris-fuelled, hare-brained schemes and gutless EU bailouts wasn’t normal, they might be more willing to cough up their fair share.