Yes, Ken Dodd did diddle £11m – but we still admire his last laugh on the taxman

Here’s the news: a very wealthy man changes his marital status two days before his death — and, as a result, manages to avoid £11 million of inheritance tax which would otherwise have been available to fund public services.

You might think this crafty fellow would (posthumously) now be vilified. If so, you would be wrong.

For the man in question is sir Ken Dodd, and it was he who married his partner of 40 years, 77-year- old Anne Jones, in March last year when he was 90 and on his deathbed.

This we knew: what is new is that probate on his estate has now been granted and his will made public — and at £27.5m, his fortune was much bigger than anyone (except perhaps sir Ken) had imagined.

Aversion

Anyway, the couple’s last- minute marriage has snatched 40 per cent of that sum from the clutches of the revenue, as inheritance tax is not payable on money and property transferred to a surviving spouse.

And to judge from comments I have read in online forums, there is universal approbation for Dodd’s last laugh on the taxman.

Indeed, his aversion to paying taxes was the source of many of the jokes which made him such a popular figure. This stemmed from his trial for tax evasion 30 years ago.

The prosecution had seemed cut and dried. It revealed how the comedian had made ‘cash and carry’ flights to the Isle of Man and Jersey to deposit his earnings in 20 different accounts.

After the trial, Dodd paid back the money owed in taxes, along with a penalty — but he had been acquitted by the jury, who clearly sympathised with him more than they did with the state.

Doubtless this was because he had entertained them so royally during the weeks the case dragged out.

Thus, when asked by the judge what it felt like to carry the hundreds of thousands of pounds of cash found in suitcases in the attic of his house, Dodd replied: ‘The notes are very light, M’Lord.’

There was also a memorable encounter when the prosecuting barrister confronted the comedian with an apparently damning affidavit from an accountant.

‘ But, sir, the man is dead,’ Dodd appealed to the court.

The prosecutor hit back: ‘What matters is his evidence. Whether he’s alive or dead is entirely irrelevant.’

Dodd reduced the court to uncontrollable laughter with his instant retort: ‘It’s very relevant to him, sir.’

For the rest of his career, Dodd made his tribulations with the Inland revenue, and his own now notorious miserliness, a staple of his stage act.

Shirkers

For example: ‘I thought it would be a good idea to go into politics. Maybe I am a little old, but you know, I’d love to be Chancellor of the exchequer. That way I’ll be reunited with my money.’

And, referring to the Inland revenue and ‘ income tax self-assessment’: ‘ They stole that idea from me.’

This gag hits home with all those who have to fill in their own self-assessment forms. We freelancers have a more vivid sense of the proportion of our earnings that we forgo in tax, since we write the cheques ourselves, having (perhaps with the help of an accountant) worked out exactly how much of the money in our bank account is not for our family to enjoy after all. PAYe is painless by comparison. It is, of course, morally as well as legally imperative to pay our due taxes. The more people who behaved like Ken Dodd, the more the burden would increase on honest taxpayers. But despite what Jeremy Corbyn and the Left would have you believe, the well-to-do in the UK are not shirkers when it comes to funding the welfare state. Far from it.

The tax burden in the UK, as a percentage of GDP, is at its highest level in more than 30 years. The top one per cent of earners now pay 28 per cent of all income tax — a third higher than the proportion they paid at the turn of the century.

And the top 10 per cent of earners are paying nearly twice as much in real terms towards the country’s tax take as the wealthiest 10 per cent did in the 1970s.

Punitive

There is a lesson in this. The Thatcher government’s abolition of punitive rates of tax on the highest earners had the effect of boosting the income the state collected — because of the policy’s beneficial impact on the economy as a whole, not least in ending what was known as ‘the brain drain’.

We are constantly being told that people would ‘be happy to pay more in tax to fund public services’. real-world evidence suggests otherwise.

A year ago, the Financial Times revealed that since 2000, only 200 people had made bequests to the Inland revenue (above what they were required to pay).

The bequests totalled £ 8.3m. That piddling sum compares with the roughly £10 billion which Britons give — every year — to their chosen charities.

An entertaining insight into this was provided by a recent BBC documentary which asked passers-by to say if they would be prepared to ‘pay more in taxes to fund public services’.

To those who said ‘yes’, the reporter handed a form on which the allegedly willing volunteers could indicate how much more they would pay, with room for their signature, and which would then be passed to HMrC.

Not one of them would do so. No wonder the public is with Ken Dodd.