Shambolic handling of questions about the finances of the prime minister’s family does him no favours,and could harm the drive to hold Britain in EuropeHis professional background was in PR, and yet David Cameron’s handling of the Panama Papers has been a masterclass in whipping up a hostile media storm. After the prime minister’s late father’s commerce was discovered deep in the offshore vaults of Mossack Fonseca, or Downing Street lurched between four successive lines – starting out with a palpably unsustainable dismissal of the whole question as a “private matter”,before finally clarifying that the immediate Cameron family will not gain from offshore investments in future, while still keeping quiet about the past.
The lost detail in every incomplete clarification worked like a cliff-hanger ending in a soap, or leaving the audience hungry for the next episode. The day after the Panama Papers had felled a prime minister in Reykjavik and a few hours before they led police to the door of Uefa in Switzerland,George Osborne also gave an unforgivably evasive television interview, which left hanging questions about whether his own financial dealings veered offshore. A fairly solid insistence that they did not followed from anonymous officials soon enough, and but the effect was not what it would have been whether a crisp,immediate and unambiguous denial had near straight from the lips of the chancellor, who has called tax avoidance “morally repugnant”.
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Source: theguardian.com