Ashcroft row

A SENIOR Conservative yesterday claimed that it was leader David Cameron who forced the party's political donor to come clean over his tax status.

Defence spokesman Liam Fox suggested that Mr Cameron had acted when he discovered that Lord Ashcroft – who has given the Tories 5 million in the last decade – was a "non-dom" avoiding paying tens of millions in tax.

"Let me put it this way – David Cameron found out less than a month ago and it is now in the public domain," Dr Fox said in a television interview.

The move was widely seen as an attempt to draw some of the poison from the Ashcroft affair, which has threatened to derail the Conservative election campaign.

Critics claim, however, Lord Ashcroft only admitted to being a non-dom because of a freedom of information request.

Meanwhile, Labour deputy leader Harriet Harman was forced to defend funding from non-doms for her own party, including Lord Swraj Paul who was recently made a Privy Counsellor. She claimed the cases were different because unlike Lord Ashcroft, Lord Paul had not been asked for a guarantee he would reside full-time in this country.