Politics by numbers

1 June 2010 | By John Murray

Now we’ve had three first secretaries to the Treasury in less than one month–a development which based on the pathetic housing record doesn’t bode too well for the future.

First we had Labour’s outgoing man at the Treasury, Liam Byrne, who left his successor a funny little note saying that the financial cupboard was bare.

The recipient, former investment banker and millionaire David Laws, wasn’t amused but whoops, the Daily Telegraph discovered that Laws’cupboard wasn’t bare after all –there was a nasty little skeleton lurking somewhere in the darkness that was just leaping to get out.

Apparently, Byrne’s Treasury kitty might have been better off by around £40,000 if Laws hadn’t used our taxpayers money to pay rent to his boyfriend, James Lundie and claim it as part as his parliamentary expenses.

Gosh it couldn’t have happened to a nicer and more honourable chap we were told. The bad news is that he felt compelled to resign but the good news is that he’s so talented that he’ll probably  be back in office again, once his done his spell in purgatory. 

Peter Mandelson, it must be remembered,  set the precedent, so who knows, more cabinet appointments may well follow (though hopefully without intervening resignations) and in the fullness of time we may well see the lording of Laws and perhaps a knighthood to boot.

But that’s for the future. This weekend we saw the appointment of first secretary number three, Danny Alexander, but come Monday morning the Daily Telegraph was alleging that he had avoided paying capital gains tax on the sale of his London flat, claiming that it was his main home while he was living mostly in Scotland.

Alexander, for his part, denies that CGT was due on the property and says he had played by the rules. Whatever the truth of the matter, political sleaze is back on the agenda.

In addition, there’s a little PR problem in that swingeing increases in CGT are likely to be included in the forthcoming emergency budget, foistered on Cameron in the coalition agreement, and the question remains, is Alexander now the right man to deliver this?

But to return to my starting point, while we had nine housing ministers in 13 years, the failure to deliver on housing policy had probably more to do with problems in the economy and lack of leadership at the top than the lack of continuity that a succession of incompetents brought to the job.

On that score we had one man in the hot seat for most of that time as chancellor – that was Gordon Brown and he then became Prime Minister. And Brown has surely done more than anyone else to demonstrate that numbers in politics can be misleading,