Richard Murphy writes yet another of his characteristically ill-informed op-ed pieces:

If there’s anyone mourning the end of one of the shortest cabinet careers ever I think they need to seek professional help.

David Laws fulfilled all my expectations of the Orange Book Liberals: cold, ruthless, uncaring willingness to inflict harm on the ordinary people of this country in pursuit of a bankrupt mantra based on economic ineptitude: extreme in the nineteenth century; unpalatable beyond imagination now.

Worse than that, the excuse offered for his deception is clear evidence of a cold, calculated and deliberate abuse based on fine reading of the rules and the use of the mindset of the tax avoider: that the spirit of the law may be legitimately abused.

I am delighted this man has been exposed for such abuse.

Richard makes a lot of his Christian faith. So I'm dismayed to see such wilfully callous garbage from someone who should know better.  Richard certainly knows his onions when it comes to the technicalities of arcane bits of tax law. But he clearly has a great deal to learn about human nature.

Even by his own low standards, his is is a revolting blogpost, one which - on a Sunday - I hope he will see fit to take down.

I see no evidence of malice aforethought in what David Laws did. He's certainly not blameless, for sure, but it takes  a particularly perverted, unkind and distorted vision of your fellow man to view what he did as "cold, calculated and deliberate abuse".

As someone on CiF pointed out today:

While I concede there were certainly other ways Laws could have gone about keeping his relationship a secret and the claims he made were far from essential to achieve this, I think this is unduly harsh. We already know that if he'd arranged things more honestly he could have fleeced the taxpayer for far more money. And if the man was motivated primarily by cash why would he give up a lucrative job in the City to go into politics - with the Liberal Democrats?

That seems perfectly balanced to me. You'd have to be a particularly partisan and dribbling leftie to read anything more into his sorry situation.  Isn't it about time Ritchie grew up and learned to transcend tribal politics?

People who read this post also read:

• Sometimes Ritchie shoots himself in the foot
• That David Cameron family tax haven non-story in full
• Ritchie vs facts
• Tax evasion estimates and deja-vu
• Zoe Williams on tax avoidance

Filed under: Other blogs with tags christianity, david laws, guardian, idiots, richard murphy