One rule for him and one for the rest of us...?

What amazes me is how Lord Ashcroft ever got away with being a non-dom for tax purposes in the first place.

Put very simply, your domicile is determined by your roots. The country in which you were born and raised will generally be the domicile that stays with you until you die. Looked at from another angle, your domicile will be the country you most relate to. Expatriates who have lived abroad for decades, bought and resided in foreign properties, paid foreign taxes and never returned to the UK can still be classified as domiciliaries of the UK by HM Revenue & Customs, who will tax them and their estates accordingly.

An expatriate keen to shake off UK domicile status and take up another, must provide a plethora of evidence, direct and circumstantial, to that end. Life-style has to be, and be seen to be, 100% that of the adopted country. Implicit in this course of action is the severing of all ties with the UK, and total immersion in the new country's culture, including, where necessary, its language.

So how can there be any doubt as to the domicile of a man who is a peer of the realm and actively legislates for the rest of us? Just what part of his extraordinary and privileged participation in the UK's governance could possibly be viewed as, to use the jargon, 'disconnected' and 'remote'?

Britain's legal system is one of binding precedent, and any long-term expat with an interest in these matters will have an in-depth understanding of the nuances of the label 'domicile', and the clear distinction in tax status between 'non-resident' and 'non-domicile' - a point which, in the debate about Lord Ashcroft, William Hague seems consistently to muddle. They will have followed the case of Gaines-Cooper versus HM Revenue & Customs as it wended its way through the Court of Appeal towards its landmark ruling.

Despite being non-resident for well over thirty years, the detail of Mr Gaines-Cooper's connections to the UK which caught the taxman's eye included holding a badge at Royal Ascot for 30 years, having a Rolls-Royce or two garaged in the UK, and the payment of fees to a private school in the UK shortly after the birth of a son.

Gaines-Cooper lost his case.

I like to think I'm as imaginative as the next woman, but I doubt even J K Rowling could find a way of camouflaging the domicile of Lord Ashcroft. This peer of the realm's presence and involvement in the UK is plainly evident, not only in his life-style, but in a way that impacts directly on the rest of the population.

If such trifling details as those in the Gaines-Cooper case can stand up as irrefutable evidence of domicile, can someone explain to me how on earth Lord Ashcroft has been getting away with it?
http://www.expatmoneychannel.com/node/1167