http://www.spectator.co.uk/spectator-life/spectator-life-life/9022871/socialist-climbing/
Revealed: Ed Miliband's Bollinger bolsheviks
Despite the class-war rhetoric, Labour’s elite is still intensely comfortable with being filthy rich — and it’s becoming ever more so
Not a day goes by without some second-tier shadow minister squawking about the ‘cabinet of millionaires’. Under the new politics that Ed Miliband heralded when he won the Labour leadership, the backgrounds of David Cameron and his posho chums are fair game.
Some on the red side are a little quieter on the topic of dosh and background, though. Thanks to a complex web of companies, foundations and trusts, no one knows exactly how much money Tony Blair has made since he left office, but it’s safe to say it’s a bucketload. The earning capacity of other architects of New Labour — Lord Mandelson and Alastair Campbell, for instance — is well documented. And things aren’t exactly grim for the colleagues they left behind at the coalface. In the Miliband ranks there are some spectacularly rich individuals: gold-plated MPs, millionaire spin doctors and property-tycoon donors. Milibandism is awash with money.
Politicians’ wealth and background is an obvious line of attack for any Labour team, especially one as left of centre as Miliband’s, yet you might think Ed would have a look around his own back yard first. Perhaps he could start in his actual back garden; he has acknowledged that his house, valued at £2.3 million, would be subject to the sort of mansion tax he wants to introduce. It’s in Dartmouth Park, a leafy corner of north London that’s a favourite with Labour’s current ruling class — nice schools, a low crime rate and not too many poor people.
Miliband played the market well, selling flats and a house in Hampstead as well as employing some rather nifty accounting with his brother and mother in what appears to be a very efficient reaction to their inheritance from his late father. Add to that a house in Doncaster, his £139,000 salary and his wife’s reported income of £200,000 at the Bar, and life is pretty rosy for the Labour leader. He is in good -company, too.
On the Labour benches, the steel heiress Margaret Hodge’s millions are an obvious example. Steel giants Stemcor have made the Oppenheimers more than £190 million and their daughter Margaret, with her £18 million slice, is the richest woman in Parliament. Hodge and her brother own 9 per cent of the company, though Hodge describes this as ‘tiny’. And who could forget Shaun Woodward, who married a Sainsbury’s heiress and declares property in ‘France, New York State and the West Indies from which rental income is received’? With a good claim to being the richest man in Westminster, the former Northern Ireland Secretary has done well out of property, selling a St James’s Park townhouse to Sting for £5.7 million, making about £3 million on the deal and ploughing the cash back into other properties. In 2011 it was reported that Woodward sold his palatial Hamptons retreat for £11.5 million, leaving he and his wife with just half a dozen properties. Woodward sold Sarsden House, his Oxfordshire pile, in 2006 for £24 million. It is not known whether he retained the services of its famous butler.
While Ed’s focus groups tell him to whack the government as ‘out of touch’ Etonian toffs, you will not hear Harriet Harman having a dig at Osborne for going to St Paul’s. The Labour deputy leader is a niece of the Earl of Longford, has a Suffolk estate, and an is Old Paulina herself. Not content with her bumper government pension, she managed to get hubby a seat on the gravy train too. Old-timer socialist Michael Meacher could help solve the housing shortage by flogging one of the ten homes that make up his extensive property portfolio.
You don’t hear shadow international development secretary Hilary Benn saying much about Dave and co having big houses either. Along with a £2 million pad in Chiswick, Benn does not like to mention the family estate. While his old man gave up his titles to become an MP, the Benns were a little more reluctant to lose all those acres of Essex.