I am certain that the Tories will spend the next couple of weeks lying in parliament and in the media, pretending that tax avoidance schemes which are now under more scrutiny are normal and that no one has done anything wrong. And the furore will die down, with the help of a complicit media (owned, in the main, by very wealthy people who also use offshore accounting to avoid tax) or once the government announce a "quick: look over there" policy that diverts attention away from it.
But what would happen if it continued? If the media picked up their game and did what they should do, which is holding the government to account, and if Corbyn and the SNP keep up the pressure in parliament on Cameron, Osborne and their chums, could Cameron resign? He might want to, but I seriously doubt it, and here's why.
Cameron is of course, the focus of this as the Prime Minister responsible for crippling austerity that is hitting the poorest and most vulnerable hardest. Lately, talk has been of only two potential Tory leaders: Osborne and Boris Johnson. Osborne certainly has his hands dirty in this too: his family business, of which he is one of the owners, uses similar tax-dodging schemes and have got away with avoiding huge amounts of tax too. Johnson has made his feelings about tax quite clear over the years (stating in 2015 that "people have a legitimate right to minimise their tax obligations if they can" and also saying that the Boots boss has "a fiduciary duty to their shareholders to minimise their obligations") and I would be astonished if he didn't also have some involvement in one or more tax avoidance schemes.
Teresa May has seemingly come out of this scandal ("what scandal?" -all Tories) squeaky clean - so far at least. I suspect recent narrowing down of the contest to a Johnson Vs Osborne battle is in no small part down to the nature of the right which is permanently clinging to the past. It struggled with gay marriage; it struggles with the idea of opening our borders to people fleeing war zones and it still struggles with women, despite (and in the case of some journalists and commentators possibly partly because of) Thatcher's success. The papers have never talked about May as seriously as the two male contenders. Her popularity may have faltered over the last year with even some conservative supporters feeling her policies on refugees and public data privacy go too far.
Any others? Bookies currently have Michael Gove ahead of Theresa May and of late, he has managed to keep himself out of the limelight in his roles as Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice. If he continues to keep a low profile, he may become a real contender although I feel where Osborne, May and even Boris Johnson have a considerable edge is with their image. Gove has the sort of smug, posh, grin that Armando Iannucci would have deemed too much of a caricature for a 'Thick of It' character. His attempts to impress with language and his fondness for very old-fashioned-sounding policies make him equally as absurd a character as Johnson but without the strangely-popular buffoonery of his scruffy colleague.
Three others are also currently rated by bookies. Sajid Javid has come out of the steel industry crisis ("what crisis?" -all Tories) with less credibility than he had before. And I think some of those closer to the far right might struggle with a candidate whose name doesn't sound "British". Stephen Crabb, hasn't been around front-line English politics (Tories don't really care about Wales) long enough and is currently only really known as the MP involved with a company who apparently think they can "cure" gay people. The image-conscious spin-machine will have trouble with that one, even if they feel the LGBT vote isn't theirs to lose. Finally, there is Priti Patel, who as well as having the same problem Sajid Javid has in appealing to the far right of the party as someone with a non-British family history, also has the ignominy of being one of the most expensive MPs in the country. The increase in her expenses claims has been huge and as one of the loudest small-state, pro-cuts Tories, she would find it hard to come across as anything other than a massive hypocrite. She also has the smaller issue of her family connections to UKIP.
So the Conservatives find themselves in a position where, certainly at the moment, they would much rather have a leader known to be a hypocrite and a liar when it comes to matters of tax avoidance, than possibly any of the contenders.
But as I said at the beginning of this post, with most of the media on-side and Corbyn likely to move on to other important issues, the party will probably ride this out. Sadly, the next general election is so far away the Tories have plenty of time to bombard the voting public with more lies and false promises and after last year and with almost 100% of the media kicking lumps out the Labour leadership all the time, I wouldn't be surprised if they won another majority in 2020. By which point, we'll have nothing left to fight for anyway.
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