When Margaret Hodge walks down the street, people beam from ear to ear and stop to shake her hand – rare indeed for politicians. Single-handedly, she turned the dull-sounding public accounts committee into the most rigorous scrutineer, excoriating wrongdoers and backsliders. Watch bankers, tax-avoiding CEOs, failing ministers and permanent secretaries quail under her sharp tongue. Razor-sharp analysis and forensic questioning are her weapons, while jargon-free indignation sears her criticisms on the public mind. “I think you do evil!” will never be forgotten by the wretched executive from tax-avoiding Google. She made mincemeat of Amazon for earning £4.2bn but paying just £3.2m UK tax.
Tax avoidance was nowhere on the political spectrum until she sharpened her scalpel on HMRC and its sweetheart deals. She lambasted the big four accountancy firms for playing on both sides – advising government on tax schemes, then telling clients how to avoid them. Without her, George Osborne would never have taken up the scandal that deprives the Treasury of billions.
Iain Duncan Smith and the Department for Work and Pensions have been lashed over his disastrous universal credit, work programme and personal independence payment fiascos: how many more times will she catch them warping the figures? Monumental failure of border controls is another Hodge perennial, the asylum seekers backlog longer than when Charles Clarke was forced to resign. She sets about the “quasi-monopoly” of a handful of private contractors controlling the £90bn government market, new contracts given to some under fraud investigation. No wonder people love her – except those arraigned before her.
