David Laws has been keeping two secrets. The first secret was revealed last week – it turns out David Laws is an incredibly impressive Minister, able to pick up his brief as Chief Secretary to the Treasury and run with it in a very short space of time. If the coalition has done anything, it’s given Laws a chance to prove his worth with real responsibility rather than sticking to the normal script for Lib Dems and languishing on the opposition benches for an entire political career.
The other secret came out yesterday. In a clumsy attempt to conceal his sexuality and protect the privacy of himself and his partner, Laws had been claiming rent on a “room” in his partner’s flat as his second home. Fair enough, he’s entitled to claim for a second home, but MPs haven’t been allowed to make payments to their spouses since 2006. That why he’s in trouble today.
I think few can imagine what it must be like trying to keep your sexuality a secret whilst living in the public gaze, especially when MPs have their living arrangements as a matter of public record but when the rules changed Laws was faced with a horrible dilemma: He could move out of his partner’s flat and live on his own OR “out” himself and his partner and claim the same money in a different way OR do nothing and carry on as before, exploiting the fuzzy definition of ‘treated as a spouse’ in the rules.
Laws, it seems, chose the last option – he wanted to continue his living arrangements and NOT out himself… and so, when the Telegraph found out David Laws was in a relationship with the man he was renting from, they unleashed both barrels.
Can Laws survive this? It’s hard to say at this point. Alistair Campbell’s rule was that if you were still in the news after 12 days, your time was up. If this had been Labour, Laws would have gone by now – such was the weakness of their opinion polling and proximity to the election that they couldn’t afford the luxury of standing up for their colleagues. What mattered to them is how things looked not how things were, and this looks very, very bad indeed.
The sad reality for Laws is that in the current climate of anger about MPs expenses he’s unlikely to be given the benefit of the doubt by the press or the public at large. That’s one of the privileges that MPs have lost, and for all the sympathy and understanding about Laws’ motives, and irrespective of his undeniable talent, and the awful tragedy that a true social and economic liberal will almost certainly never be leader of the Lib Dems, he may still end up losing this job.
I just can’t help but feel that if I had been in the same situation, faced with the same horrendous choice between following the letter of the law or protecting my own family’s privacy I wouldn’t have done the exactly the same thing.
UPDATE: While we’re Wargaming Laws’ choices, another that’s been mooted has been ‘why didn’t he just pay out of his own pocket?’ Simple answer is that MP’s living arrangements are a matter of public record. If, when the rules changed, Laws suddenly stopped claiming for the ‘room’ he was living in and inexplicably became the only non-London based MP in the country not to bother claiming a second home allowance, he’d have been outed. Gay or not, Laws was entitled to claim the costs of living in London.
