THE TELEGRAPH: David Laws has resigned from the Coalition Cabinet after revelations that he claimed £40,000 of taxpayers’ money to pay rent to his boyfriend.
Government sources said the senior Liberal Democrat stepped down as Treasury Chief Secretary while parliamentary watchdogs investigated his expenses claims.
David Cameron and Nick Clegg, the Lib Dem leader, were understood at first to have been willing to let Mr Laws remain in his key post, at least over the weekend.
However, The Sunday Telegraph learned that at least two Lib Dem Cabinet ministers, Vince Cable and Chris Huhne, believed that the circumstances of Mr Laws’s parliamentary expenses claims “did not look good at all”. They suggested that he was left with no choice other than to step aside.
The Lib Dem Scottish Secretary, Danny Alexander, will take over from Mr Laws, 44.
Mr Laws, a former banker, won his key Cabinet post after impressing Tory negotiators in the talks that set up the coalition.
He won praise for his assured start at the Treasury, where he was in charge of imposing proposed swingeing cuts to state spending.
However, on Friday night Mr Laws referred his own case to Parliament’s standards commissioner after The Daily Telegraph disclosed that he claimed as much as £950 a month in parliamentary expenses for eight years to rent rooms in two London properties.
The houses were owned by his partner, James Lundie, a political lobbyist. In 2006, MPs were banned from “leasing accommodation from a partner”. >>> Patrick Hennessy, Melissa Kite and Patrick Sawyer | Saturday, May 29, 2010
THE TELEGRAPH: The nature of David Laws's job made it impossible for him to remain in post.
At a time when the country desperately needed an unusually able individual to fill the role of Chief Secretary to the Treasury, there had been almost unanimous agreement that David Laws, the Liberal Democrat MP for Yeovil, promised to be outstanding in the role. We face an unprecedented budget deficit. Painful cuts are necessary. Mr Laws had the financial background – he made a fortune as a successful banker before he became an MP – to understand the importance of reducing the deficit, and the political acumen to work out how to begin making the cuts in the fairest, most efficient and least damaging way possible.
Unfortunately, his frontbench career has now come to an untimely end. As The Daily Telegraph revealed on Friday night, Mr Laws claimed a total of £40,000 in rent for properties owned and inhabited by his partner. Although the newspaper would not have revealed it, Mr Laws volunteered the fact that his partner was a man, James Lundie. Changes to the rules on MPs’ expenses, introduced in July 2006, state that Parliamentary allowances “must not be used to meet the costs of… leasing accommodation from a partner or family member”. On Friday, Mr Laws promised to pay back the money. He said that he did not knowingly break the rules, because he did not think of Mr Lundie as his “partner”, or want to reveal his homosexuality, which he had kept secret from his friends and family. >>> Telegraph View | Saturday, May 29, 2010
THE GUARDIAN: The chief secretary to the Treasury entered parliament in 2001 after quitting a career in the City that had made him a millionaire
The former investment banker David Laws, 44, has risen through the Liberal Democrat ranks since entering parliament in 2001, gaining a reputation as one of a breed of young Lib Dem MPs whose promotion of free market policies contrast with the party's left-leaning traditions.
Laws is co-author of the Orange Book, calling for a return to the "traditional building blocks of liberalism", including free trade and a belief in the effectiveness of the private sector.
He also believes in limits to EU powers and an end to the common agricultural policy. Although his perspective is more centrist than rightwing, when he first stood as a Lib Dem, the Lib Dem leader Paddy Ashdown thought he was a Tory mole. After quitting a career in the City that made him a millionaire, Laws took over Ashdown's Yeovil seat in 2001. He has since rejected overtures from the Tories to defect. >>> The Guardian | Saturday, May 29, 2010
THE GUARDIAN: It is hardly credible that in 2010, after all the progress that has been made, the gay liberation message still needs to be heard
The closet causes crises. It is an unhappy place to live and David Laws is not the first person who, on being forced out, immediately talked about the "relief" of no longer having to lie. It is tempting to blame Laws himself: a man who had the ability and determination to earn a fortune by the age of 28, and be in a senior government job at 44, is obviously no shrinking violet. Why wasn't he able to take control of his life and be honest and open with his friends and family and be proud of his relationship?
Laws grew up in the 1970s, a period of lingering bigotry that thrived long after the first partial decriminalisation of gay sex in 1967. His late teens and early adulthood, a time when people discover their sexuality, coincided with the long, dark night of Thatcher (to quote Derek Jarman) when the media were full of hatred, the Conservative leader of Staffordshire county council called for Aids to be dealt with by gassing gay men and police officers in gangs of 50 raided our pubs to check the licences but were too busy to investigate the murders of gay people in Britain's streets and parks or an arson attack on the gay newspaper I then edited. Conservative election posters and Margaret Thatcher derided lesbian and gay rights, while speakers at Tory annual conferences gave us such gems as: "If you want a queer for your neighbour, vote Labour" and, of course, there was Section 28.
Is it surprising that in this atmosphere, reflected in pulpits and playgrounds across the nation, a bright young man buried himself in work and focused his energies on making money?
Many people did come out even then; often, they were angry and demanding gay rights and gay liberation. And the one constant refrain of the lesbian and gay movement was to urge people to come out because the closet is a cold, lonely place that makes you lie again and again to those closest to you and always risks ending in tears. >>> Graham McKerrow | Saturday, May 29, 2010
