It’s difficult to imagine a more blatant, shameful and utterly contemptible piece of two-faced hypocrisy than the behaviour of Margaret Hodge that has been revealed this week. Mrs Hodge, you may recall, was chair of the Public Accounts Committee in the last parliament, when she was Labour MP for Barking.
In that role, she developed a big public profile haranguing the often hapless representatives of businesses such as Amazon, Starbucks and Google which used off-shore arrangements to minimise their tax bills.
She would haul them before her committee and denounce them, with guilt already predetermined, as if she was in charge of a show trial.
So great was her profile - and the popularity that she developed in some quarters for her attacks on business - that she has been widely touted as the Labour candidate to be Mayor of London in the 2016 vote.
But in one of the most jawdropping pieces of personal and political hypocrisy you will ever see, Mrs Hodge turns out to be herself a beneficiary of precisely that form of off-shore tax avoidance that she so regularly lambasts when used by businesses.
To the tune of a cool £1.5 million. The details are that in 2011 she was a beneficiary of the closure of a trust based in Lichtenstein, a principality regularly used for tax avoidance because of its very low tax rates. This trust held shares in Stemcor, a steel trading company set up by her father. Mrs Hodge was given 96,000 shares. Express.
