THE BUDGET IDEA CHANCELLOR PINCHED FROM MY FATHER

THE Chancellor had a bit of fun in the Budget, at least when announcing that he would end the ‘non-dom’ status — a remnant of Empire which for centuries has allowed certain people living here (foreigners usually) to be treated for tax purposes as if their actual domicile is elsewhere.

Labour were always going to sneer that Jeremy Hunt was copying their plans. So from the despatch box he pre-empted that by observing: ‘Nigel Lawson wanted to end the non-dom regime in his great tax reforming Budget of 1988, which is where I suspect the Labour Party got the idea from.’

It is true: my father, Nigel Lawson, had indeed wanted to announce that in a Budget remembered above all for reducing the top rate of tax from 60 per cent to 40 per cent.

He had told Parliament that his Budget statement was based not just on the ‘need to reduce taxes where they are clearly too high’ but also on the principle of abolishing ‘unwarranted tax breaks’: which it did in a number of ways, such as ending the ability of landowners to use forests as an elaborate tax shelter.

Actually, it was in a column in 2022 that I revealed how my father had also intended to abolish the non-dom status. It doesn’t appear in his memoir, but he had told me about it.

What did surprise me last week was that no one, either in the media or the Labour Party, asked why it never happened back in 1988, if that had been the plan.

The reason was Margaret Thatcher. Norman Lamont, who had been in my father’s Treasury team, told me:

‘When the Greek shipping merchants got wind of what we were planning, they wined and dined Margaret Thatcher, who was horrified to hear what her government was planning to do.’

My father spied something else: the Greek shipping owners in London were significant donors to Conservative Party funds, with one of them, John Latsis, at that time probably their biggest benefactor.

By contrast, Rishi Sunak, the current PM, did not get involved at all with the matter: he recused himself because of his wife’s former status as a non-dom. A fact which doubtless would have appeared in Labour broadcasts in the forthcoming election — had Hunt not shot their rather mangy fox.