Cameron took maximum second home allowance after paying off his own mortgage

David Cameron, leader of the Conservative Party, took out a maximum taxpayer-funded mortgage then paid off his own £75,000 mortgage four months later. Sunday Mail journalists digging in the Land Registry have found:

According to Land Registry documents, in 1995 Mr Cameron paid £215,000 for a house in Kensington, West London, which was part-funded with a £75,000 mortgage from Alliance & Leicester.

In August 2001, just a month after the second-home allowance went up by a staggering £5,840 per annum – from £13,628 to £19,468 – and two months after he entered the Commons, he paid £650,000 for the constituency house in Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire, and used the property as security for a £350,000 loan from HSBC.

Mr Cameron’s spokesman said last night that his offer on the house had been accepted three months earlier in May 2001.

Then, in December of that year, the Land Registry removed the Alliance & Leicester charge from its records for the Kensington home after the loan was ‘discharged by electronic means.’

Mr Cameron sold the Kensington property in 2005 for £1,150,000 – a profit of £935,000 – and bought another house nearby. His Oxfordshire home is estimated to be worth just under £1million, a paper profit of more than £300,000.

His mortgage claim is potentially contentious because, coincidentally or not, experts say that it corresponds approximately to the upper limit of the ACA, which covers the costs of running an MP’s second home. In the financial year 2002-03, the first full year Mr Cameron claimed under the ACA, he received the maximum £19,722.

In 2003-04, he claimed £20,328, just £5 less than the maximum, and in 2004-05 he took the maximum of £20,902.

In total, between 2002 and 2007 he claimed £102,874. If he had paid off £75,000 of the Oxfordshire loan, rather than clearing the mortgage on his London home, the bill would have been about £22,500 lower.

Source

Rubber Rules

It seems Cameron did nothing to break the rules, but the rules - designed by MPs and policed by their employees - are so loosely drafted they allow MPs to play the property market and swap mortgages. 

MPs tried to keep their behaviour secret, spending an estimated £100,000 of taxpayers' money in a High Court battle and - when they lost that - seeking to change the law so their conduct was exempted from the Freedom of Information Act.

David Cameron has made no mention of paying the money back or saying sorry.

Unhappy Grandees

The Conservative Party is split between modernisers and traditionalists, the latter often occupying safe seats in the shires. There are growing rumbles from grandees that Cameron is using the expenses scandal to attack them while protecting his modernising friends. One (un-named) Tory told the Sunday Mail:

Local Lunatics

'It’s like living through one of Stalin’s purges. It’s all deeply divisive. Some people are being asked simply to apologise while others are being told they have questions to answer. That’s code for: let’s get all the lunatics in a local constituency to stage a public execution.

'Although MPs have simply been obeying the rules as they were, Cameron is saying that’s not enough. He seems to want to make burnt offerings of other MPs. Fine, but on that basis, why doesn’t he repay years of mortgage interest claims above £1,250 a month that he’s claimed for?’ Source

Camerons: worth £30 million

Sunday Times Rich List compiler and wealth watchdog Philip Beresford has valued the Camerons. He says: 'I put the combined family wealth of David and Samantha Cameron at £30m plus. Both sides of the family are extremely wealthy.' Source

David Cameron is the son of Ian Donald Cameron and his wife Mary Fleur Mount the second daughter of Sir William Mount, 2nd Baronet. He is a direct descendant of King William IV (4th great grandfather) and his mistress Dorothea Jordan (thus 5th cousin, twice removed, of Queen Elizabeth II).

Samantha Cameron's family owns tracts of Lincolnshire and Yorkshire. She is a direct descendant of Nell Gwyn, mistress to Charles II. Her stepfather is Viscount Astor. She is creative director of the upmarket stationery company Smythson of Bond Street, who sell the most expensive Christmas cards in London.

31-05-09