Everyone is talking about the Tory election spending thing. Apparently, there are MPs who fear they might go to jail. The latest break involves letters sent out over David Cameron’s signature, which may count against the local spending limit because they addressed the reader as living in the constituency in question.
But that wasn’t the only Tory campaign involving direct mail that took the form of personal letters from a very senior government minister. There was another one, signed by George Osborne, that literally offered the reader hard cash and came very close to offering unauthorised financial advice. I filed a Freedom of Information Act request to find out about it, and discovered that Osborne went to some lengths to claim it was exempt from the regulations but the civil service pushed back.
The codgerbond campaign was effective. The Daily Mirror got a FOIA disclosure to the effect that the biggest sales of the bonds were in seats the Tories targeted at the election, presumably because that was where the letters were distributed. Or you could just ask the Economic Secretary to HM Treasury, Conservative MP for West Worcestershire, Harriet Baldwin:
.@David_Cameron Got a nice letter this week from a local pensioner saying thanks for the pensioner bond.
— Harriett Baldwin (@HBaldwinMP) May 2, 2015
If you bought them, you will find that once they mature, the special interest rates are no longer available, because there isn’t a general election on any more. Also, NS&I changed the terms and conditions of the offer to make it harder to withdraw your money rather than roll it over into the new issue, which This Is Money describes thus:
The short-term rates are lousy compared to what is currently on offer by challenger banks. Since the summer, there has been a battle in the independent This is Money best buy fixed-rate savings tables, with a glut of better deals on offer. In fact, the one-year rollover rate offered by NS&I is so low, it wouldn’t feature in our table, beaten by at least 18 providers.
You used to be able to ring up and cash in your investment straight back to your current account. Now you need to send in a form, or use their website. Because, you know, the Debt Management Office loves £13bn of cheap funding, what with Omnishambles Budget 2016 to pay for. It’s not a bit…Angolan, though, as Alan Clark memorably put it?
Really, everyone in the UK ought to be jointly ashamed of this. This is the kind of polity we’ve ended up living in.
Annoyingly, I can’t find a complete letter, because I am fascinated to find out if they were localised in any way. If they were, they might constitute yet another spending limit violation. The original Guardian piece just contains a cropped detail but I’m convinced I saw a full version at the time.
Update: Can you help, I said, and they did! Here’s an image of the whole letter. It didn’t, as it happens, contain a locally-targeted message, so it wasn’t illegal. Only shameful. Thanks to Rich Greenhill on twitter.
