Two things in life are certain: death and taxes. But those two inevitabilities don’t need to come as a package.
The Cameron tax returns released on Saturday, along with briefings from Downing Street sources, offer a glimpse of a family that knows how to look after its cash, of which the family have plenty.
Ian and Mary Cameron, David Cameron’s parents, were reported to have made £800,000 from the sale of two paintings by 18th-century French artist Jean-Baptiste Greuze in 2006. In 2009, Ian’s personal fortune was estimated at £10m by the Sunday Times Rich List.
Asked why the prime minister’s bank account enjoyed a huge spike in interest accrued on savings a year into Cameron’s time in Downing Street, a spokesman said that 2011 saw huge incomings from his parents’ estate.
Following the death of his father the previous year, the prime minister received £300,000 tax free from the £2.7m estate – under the £325,000 threshold on which tax of 40% is paid.
And, it has now emerged, two further payments were made from the Cameron estate that year. In May 2011, 81-year-old Mary gifted her son – then a year into his job as prime minister of the United Kingdom – £100,000. In July that year, she did it again.
A spokesman for the prime minister explained that, some years earlier, Cameron’s brother got the family house. In 2006, Ian’s eldest son, Alexander Cameron QC, became the sole owner of the family’s home in Berkshire, where David Cameron had been brought up. The property is estimated to be worth more than £2.5m.
A family home in Kensington, London, worth £1m, had already passed to his two daughters in equal share.
The payments to Cameron were a way of acknowledging that, the spokesman said. This was the prime minister’s share of the future inheritance. It was Cameron’s moment to enjoy his mother’s largesse.
The law as it stands stipulates that estates may not have to pay inheritance tax on assets the deceased gave away as gifts while they were alive.
The donor of the thing of value – whether that be money, property or possessions – must live for seven years after giving the gift for it to be entirely free from inheritance tax. But there is a sliding scale. The sooner the gift is made, the more that is tax free up to £325,000.
The last time Mary Cameron was in the news it was over her decision to sign a petition against cuts being implemented by the prime minister’s own county council.
“Cutting these essential services would leave families vulnerable and isolated and fail an entire generation of children,” said the petition to which Mrs Cameron, who served for years as a magistrate, put her name.
