Bernard Ingham: Cameron must see sense as hypocrisy rules nation

The main threat is from his own party, which has destroyed two previous Prime Ministers – Thatcher and John Major – partly over Europe in the last 35 years. How stupid can the Stupid Party get? We shall see.

To complicate matters, what happens if, please God, the electorate votes on June 23 to leave Europe and then Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party lines up with the Scottish Nationalists, both of whom
were educated at the university of loose living, or should I say loose financial conduct?

We know that the Welsh Nationalists and Sinn Fein would join them in spirit. So what would the Liberal Democrats and the more enlightened Ulstermen do then, poor things?

Would they egg on Eurosceptic Tories to demand Cameron’s head or will the Tories at last recognise the error of their ways, come together and tell the insufferable Nicola Sturgeon that the Scottish people settled their future in the 2014 referendum for a generation and to get lost.

We could do with a smack of firm government. Cameron and Chancellor George Osborne deserve to survive provided they smarten up their act sharpish.

They need to recognise their responsibility to save us not just from Corbyn’s Labour and the SNP but also from Boris Johnson, who is a rumbustious joke trying to emulate Winston Churchill but lacks the great man’s underlying gravitas. Boris may be fun but not as PM.

Meanwhile, the society Cameron has to cope with is, frankly, in an awful mess.

Zealots lie in wait at every corner to enforce political correctness. They are so bent on making the past conform to their current prejudices that not even the Empire-builder Cecil Rhodes can rest undisturbed in effigy in Oxford.

Our police forces are so confused and terrified by witch hunters that they feel obliged either to overlook the heinous abuse of youngsters lest they be accused of racism or to besmirch the reputations of ex-Prime Ministers and Home Secretaries as well as Field Marshals in pursuit of entirely uncorroborated allegations.

The judiciary can never be relied upon to help with a dose of common sense. It prefers to find reasons why convicted foreign crooks can remain in this once sceptred isle.

As for brass, we are now in one of those remarkable national fits of head banging – this time over the Prime Minister’s parents trying to help their son financially.

Yet everybody knows that, if they had the cash, they would be doing exactly the same – that is, to maximise their family’s tax advantage within the law – unless of course you are one of Corbyn’s comics who takes the view that money
in the hands of the proletariat (as distinct from the comics) is the root of all evil.

The hypocrisy currently ruling the nation over offshore tax havens and those who use them is wonderful to behold. The leak of the Panama Papers has shown that using them is not a British disease but a common international contagion.

This is not surprising. They oil the wheels of commerce. They can shelter you from paying tax in the haven itself but not on profits on investments made with the sheltered funds in other countries or on your net income in the UK.

I am entirely against the illegal evasion of tax and take a dim view of companies that manipulate their accounts to pay next to no tax on the profits they make in countries where they operate and even
to offset past losses against current profits.

But I am hanged if I know where tax evasion ends and avoidance and then aggressive avoidance begins. It seems to move with the mood of the nation regardless of the law.

We need a new international order that, while facilitating trade, ends the ability of corporations and individuals to avoid taxes on profits in countries where they operate and removes the incentive to make losses with which to offset such profits.

And if Cameron had the sense he was born with he would remind us all that with Corbyn and Sturgeon in charge offshore tax havens would flourish as never before.

We shall not rid ourselves of them until the cost of using them to avoid tax is more than it’s worth. That would never happen in a taxed-to-the-hilt Corbyn/Sturgeon Britain. Tories beware: ditch Cameron and feel the Lefties’ sting.