Evil Diaries: Now You’re Dorking

Lord Kenneth Baker of Dorking (a former Conservative cabinet minister) weighs in against Nadhim Zahawi in today’s Times claiming that legal tax avoidance cannot be practised by a cabinet minister. However legal tax avoidance complies with the law and a learned judge declared many decades ago that no taxpayer is under any obligation to pay more tax than he owes. Hence our Ken is outwith the law.

In the same letter Ken also declares that “in future no minister should be allowed to set up an overseas family trust in a tax haven”. He does not say what he means by this blanket ban. After all, these trusts are almost invariably set up long before the career of the settlor is established and most modest fellows decline to forecast their sitting in the cabinet perhaps twenty years before in fact they do.

I imagine that Zahawi enjoys non-dom status as quite possibly does his wife (who has a property company which received a £30m unsecured loan). He never wrote the law that establishes this status.

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Apparently if one attends the World Economic Forum at Davos and one fancies employing a hooker one merely points at the ceiling. Are there cameras in every room recording these urges? Do hookers station themselves on the fringes of gatherings? I do not know.

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Meanwhile, predictably, the mood of overseas investment into the UK is being inhibited by governmental silliness. As a result Sir James Dyson and Sir Rocco Forte have so commented in public. I am sure that they represent the underlying trend. Needless to add, the Labour Party has lined up to be equally as silly as HMG. Will these parliamentary buffoons ever learn?

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Try as I may I cannot begin to see why Richard Sharp should not happily continue as chairman of the BBC. He is palpably very intelligent and merely introduced one of Bojo’s distant relations to the fact that Bojo would like to borrow £800,000. The notion that this introduction facilitated his becoming chairman of the BBC is potty although readily to be claimed by the Labour Party.

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N.Brown (BWNG) is sharply ahead this morning at 35p as the market wakes up to the fact that bid talks may well be on the way. The Alliances are loaded with stock and the Mashley feels like running the joint. It is simply a matter of price and it is hard to see why this should be less than 60p.

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Finally, investment tutorials continue here at Chelsea, complete with accompanying lubricants such as the product of my mixological skills, bullshots. My number remains 020 7835 0868.