Richard Tice says he’s giving hope to millions - his tax affairs may tell a different story

Richard Tice sounded almost wounded. The Sunday Times’s latest revelations about his tax affairs were, he said, “just an attempt to smear a successful businessman turned politician giving hope to millions of people”. Hope is, of course, the main emotion one associates with Reform UK, a party whose other big intervention last weekend was Robert Jenrick’s online whinge that poor and disabled people were stealing from hardworking families via the medium of cut-price tickets to London Zoo.

It’s true, to be fair, that the party’s deputy leader has faced trials and persecutions that would, in an earlier age, have made him a candidate for canonisation. Having led the party during its all-important wilderness years after Nigel Farage’s well-earned retirement in 2021, Tice was shoved carelessly aside the moment the 2024 election was called, leading his predecessor and majority shareholder to decide that perhaps he might un-retire again after all.

After that, the lawless chaos of Sadiq Khan’s London forced Tice’s partner Isabel Oakeshott (like thousands of vulnerable people each year), to seek asylum in Dubai. (Actually, she also blamed VAT on private school fees, so perhaps she’s an economic migrant.)

That compelled Tice in turn to split his time between Westminster, Skegness and the Gulf. We don’t talk enough about the effect migration has on families, we really don’t.

And through all this, the Lincolnshire MP has been pursued through the press for nothing more than the same sort of tax-efficient regime as we would surely all employ if we could – even though it is, as he says himself, “hardly a story”.

The hardly-a-story in question comes, like earlier instalments, from Gabriel Pogrund of the Sunday Times, and uses research from Tax Policy Associates’ Dan Neidle. It claims that Tice’s property investment firm Quidnet REIT Limited didn’t pay a 20% levy on dividends known as the withholding levy, resulting in Tice receiving £91,000 in “excess payments”.

The paper alleges that this broke the law; Tice says that the revenue and customs had been paid in full. HMRC itself has refused to comment, but can’t we all agree that this is a minor administrative error that does not make Tice a candidate for the sack and “the biggest hypocrite in the land”, as he dubbed Angela Rayner over a missing £40,000 in stamp duty last year?

No, apparently, we can’t all agree. Dissenters include the Labour Party (“a major scandal which goes to the heart of Richard Tice’s integrity and credibility”) and Sir Ed Davey (“morally completely indefensible”). But this is surely small beer compared to what we already knew. Last month, the Sunday Times revealed that a complex corporate ownership structure had saved Tice nearly £600,000 in corporation tax, over six times the figure in this week’s report. Perhaps that’s why this one’s hardly a story.

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If Tice’s claim to be spreading hope raised an eyebrow or two, his other line of defence may be more relatable. “How many friends of yours would voluntarily choose to pay more tax than they are legally obliged to do?” he asked in March. Who among us has not used a trust in Jersey, three shell companies and a pension investment vehicle to reduce our tax burden by a mid-six-figure sum? The median full-time salary last year, incidentally, was just under £40,000.

Whether a belief that maximising tax revenues is “the road to ruin for the UK as an economy” is the ideal qualification for a man who’d like to be responsible for the nation’s finances is an open question. But at risk of cynicism, I am not convinced that Tice’s argument entirely stacks up.

He’s surely right that people do not want to pay more tax themselves – but since every bit of polling we have suggests that they still want functioning public services, then millionaire property developers are surely exactly the sort of people they want to see paying for it in their stead. Where the hope comes into any of this I am not exactly sure.

Perhaps I’m wrong. Perhaps Richard Tice knows something we don’t, and the simple pleasure of watching the rich get richer really does give millions hope. Perhaps it’s those of us who would like to see the public realm repaired that are out of touch with the honest, hardworking families who dream of nothing more than living on a luxury gated estate while the world outside starts to look like Mad Max.

If that truly is your vision of the good life, then you, like Tice, have options. I’m sure Isabel would love to see you in Dubai.

Jonn Elledge’s The World as We Built It: A History of Civilisation in 31 Innovations is published by Headline in August