Tax avoidance
Who decided that keeping money in ‘paradise’ is a crime? We should all thank havens
Maybe we should blame John Grisham. In his breakthrough best-seller The Firm, the young lawyer Mitch, played by Tom Cruise…
Diary
With hindsight maybe it was silly for me to bleat, ‘As everyone knows, the Johnsons are neither posh nor rich’…
Tax returns to boast about
As Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell whinge away about how rich David Cameron’s family is, they might consider that in…
The wisdom of pitchfork-wielding crowds
In a way the headline to my fellow columnist Dominic Lawson’s Sunday Times commentary on 12 April said it all.…
Let’s refocus the Panama story on the bad stuff that really matters
There were moments last week when I was ready to give up journalism and retrain in a less unsavoury profession…
Sex, lies and tax returns
The confected scandal around the Panama papers is part of a concerted and sinister attempt to change what counts as private
My confession: I began dodging tax aged eight
As someone who still entertains hope of becoming a member of Parliament one day, I’d better come clean about my…
The road to Panama
The 11 million documents leaked from Panama lawyers Mossack Fonseca tell us much that we know already. It’s hardly news…
Barometer
Squire power The village of West Heslerton in Yorkshire was put up for sale at £20 million after its owner,…
The Spectator’s notes
However wicked tax evasion is and however distasteful some tax avoidance may be, people should imagine a world without tax…
Credit where it’s due to Tata, our greatest inward investor
If asked to pick the UK’s inward investor of the century so far I would, without hesitation, name Ratan Tata,…
A big hand for the two-faced tax hacks
Something odd happened at the Guardian on Monday as the paper’s editorial staff were basking in the glow of their…
Mr Bear is back: sit tight because he may be with us for a while
Like Leonardo DiCaprio in The Revenant, we’ve just been savaged by a bear but we’ll probably survive. Leading UK-listed stocks…
Just in time, Osborne answers Labour’s 50p tax trick with a bumper monthly surplus
Last week’s public borrowing and tax-receipt figures, headlined ‘Chancellor hails biggest monthly surplus in seven years’, received considerably less attention…
Barometer
Gun lords The House of Lords shooting range is to be turned into a cupboard, having previously survived an attempt…
How do you define tax avoidance?
On the face of it, the moral case against tax avoidance seems pretty straightforward. If you’re a UK taxpayer and…
Green must answer for HSBC’s faults — but he’s another victim of big banking’s perils
Stephen Green — the former trade minister Lord Green of Hurstpier-point, who became this week’s political punchbag— was always a…
Will Osborne’s tilt against Double Dutch tax dodgers play into Farage’s hands?
George Osborne’s promise to crack down on multinational companies’ avoidance of UK taxes by the use of impenetrable devices such…
Apollodorus on tax avoidance
The taxman will soon be ordering those planning dodgy tax avoidance schemes to declare them beforehand and pay the full…
Should Gary Barlow give back his gong?
‘Strip him of his knighthood!’ Or life peerage, or CBE, OBE — or whatever. The cry goes up with a kind…
The Spectator’s Notes
David Cameron is said to want a woman to be chairman of the BBC Trust, now that Chris Patten has…
The Labour party at prayer
Believe me, it’s not easy to be a Tory in today’s C of E
What Vodafone should do with its huge windfall: invest it in the next Vodafone
Vodafone, which has just collected an £84 billion windfall from the sale of its 45 per cent stake in Verizon…
Detroit’s bankruptcy isn’t ‘creative destruction’ – it’s old-fashioned mismanagement
One of the best articles I ever commissioned as an editor was an account by James Doran of a road…
