He's been UKIP leader for less than a week, but Lord Pearson of Rannoch caught the attention of today's Daily Telegraph in the way that so many MPs did earlier in the year - for claiming different homes were his main home for different purposes:
"Lord Pearson of Rannoch claimed about £100,000 in publicly-funded allowances between 2001 and 2007 to cover the cost of staying at the house in central London... He was able to claim the money because he told Parliament that his 12,000-acre estate in Perthshire was his “main home”. However, when he sold the London house for almost £3.7 million in June 2007, he told HMRC that the property was his “principal private residence”. This meant that he did not pay capital gains tax of 40 per cent on the profits from the sale. He said that his accountant had worked out that he would have faced a tax bill for about £275,000 had he told HMRC that the property was his second home."
I hasten to add that no law has been broken and that all his actions were legal - the defence used by so many other parliamentarians.
However, this hardly augurs well for a party which profited electorally at the European election for not being part of the mainstream political class which was embroiled in Expensesgate, does it?
