While the mainstream media is busy telling us Theresa May is as kittenlike as her heels, the new Prime Minister is busy appointing ministers who will carry on Cameron’s Tory programme of cutting work, pay and benefits; clamping down on human rights; and playing to the gallery on the question of immigration. The collateral damage of May’s arrival at number 10 includes David Cameron, George Osborne and Michael Gove.
David Cameron There was some initial concern that Theresa May’s arrival, so much sooner than Cameron had planned, had left the Cameron household with nowhere to live. Hold back your tears. The family had rented out the Notting Hill home (worth around £3.5 million) where they lived before they moved to Downing Street – and they are rumoured to have given their tenants notice.
A few days before the referendum vote, they took out a £800,000 remortgage on that property, so they won’t be short of a few bob. Not that they will have to spend in on an emergency hostel: they are currently living in a seven bedroomed town house in Holland Park lent by a friend, Sir Alan Parker. The house is thought to be worth £17 million (gasp). That’s rather more than their country cottage in Cameron’s constituency, thought to be worth a mere £1.3 million – but at least it will be big enough for their personal possessions, which apparently took 300 boxes to get out of Downing Street.
Cameron will now have to make do with the £75,000 annual salary of a backbench MP (only slightly more than Labour’s John “one job” Biggs takes home for running Tower Hamlets). At least the “redundancy payment” he will receive, thought to be worth £20,000, will help ease him into the relative poverty of living on just over £1,000 a week.
Cameron also has a hefty pension to look forward to. It won’t be s hefty as Tony Blair’s. The severance package given to retiring Prime Ministers in and before Blair’s time saw them being paid half their prime ministerial salary from the day they stood down and for life. Since he stood down in 2007, at the age of 53, Blair has been drawing around £80,000 a year – an extraordinary amount of public money to spend on one individual who contributes nothing to society in return. Cameron changed the system, and he will not pick up his ministerial pension (thought to be around £20,000 per annum) or his backbench MP’s pension (around £26,000 per annum – ironically very similar to the “benefits cap”) until he turns 65 in 15 years’ time.
He may have to send the wife out to work. Samantha is being tipped by the press to launch her own lucrative, top end fashion business – trading in on the allure apparently surrounding the news that she was able to get dressed each morning while she was the Prime Minister’s wife.
Michael Gove Michael Gove must be kicking himself. There he was, in the flush of excitement at winning the referendum – and he was so happy, he threw away this place on the Boris/Gove dream ticket and declared he would stand for Leader himself. Now it looks like his act of treachery may consign him to live out his parliamentary career on the back benches as Theresa May has not found any ministerial position for him to take. His pride went, most definitely, before his fall back into concerning himself solely with the problems of his Surrey Heath constituency and not spending any more time doing what he did to education and to prisons to the rest of the country.
George Osborne George Osborne is no longer Chancellor of the Exchequer – a post he held as long as Theresa May was Home Secretary. He was a man of moving goalposts – always pledging to eliminate the deficit but then changing the deadline he had set. May has now swept aside all this nonsense and said that it is OK to run a deficit in order to invest in order to boost the economy. She seems to have got that line from Jeremy Corbyn – who was told by the right wing MPs that he would make Labour unelectable if he kept saying it, and he should sound more responsible, like the Tories. He’s already been seen in a Notting Hill coffee shop with David Cameron on the first morning of May’s premiership. Let’s hope they were just planning their retirements.
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