Page 20 QQQ Daily Mail, Friday, September 6, 2019
ing’ to a business contact’s home in
Rudgwick. That evening, he per-
suaded his passenger to come for a
drive in his 190mph Porsche.
She told the court that he drove so
quickly everything was a blur, so she
asked him to slow down because of
the winding road.
But he ignored her and sped round
a bend at such speed that he lostblaming the road surface for the
crash – even though there had only
been two crashes on that stretch in
ten years – and claiming he was not
in a fit state to give a sample to
police while in hospital. However,
following legal advice he changed
his plea to guilty.
Tony Crisp, the investigating
officer for Sussex Police, said: ‘Skin-
ner had clearly set out to drive
around the countryside in a high-
powered car at high speed and
under the influence of cocaine,
resulting in a crash that caused the
victim in this case to sustain a life-
changing injury.
‘Cocaine is a class-A drug and can
have the effect of impairing a per-
son’s ability to drive safely.
He sought to prevent police taking
a blood sample to establish
how much cocaine he had in his sys-
tem and until the last moment
refused to accept responsibility for
his actions.’A WEALTHY businessman
on trial over a car crash
was blasted as ‘arrogant’
by a judge for arriving at
court two hours late in his
McLaren supercar.
Martin Skinner, who was high
on cocaine when he smashed
his Porsche into a tree and left
his passenger with serious
brain injuries, said he failed to
turn up because his alarm
clock didn’t go off.
But this did not wash with the
judge, who accused him of arro-
gance and refused to give him
any credit for pleading guilty.
Skinner, a property developer in
Mayfair, crashed at such speed
that the engine flew out of the
£140,000 Porsche 911 GT3.
The 40-year-old was convicted
of careless driving and failing to
provide a specimen to police.
He was jailed for 22 months
and banned from driving until
May 2022. Skinner, who lives in
exclusive Belgravia, central Lon-
don, lost control of the Porsche
on the A281 near Rudgwick,
West Sussex.
In the incident, on August 24
last year, his 30-year-old female
passenger received ‘life-chang-
ing’ injuries. Skinner was show-ing off to the woman before the
smash, Worthing magistrates’
court in West Sussex heard.
Police found that on the morn-
ing of the crash, he tried to set up
a supercar trip to France, but his
friends turned down the idea.
Instead, he decided to ‘go rally-By Jake Hurfurt
Jailed: Martin Skinner poses with a McLaren‘Refused to accept
responsibility’Arrogant tycoon
turns up late for
car crash trial
...in a McLaren
control and crashed. She was flown
to King’s College Hospital in Lon-
don and spent a week in a coma.
Thirteen months later, she is still
recovering from her injuries.
Skinner tested positive for cocaine
at the scene. But after being taken
to Guildford Hospital he refused to
give a legally admissible sample to
measure the drug in his blood.
Initially, he pleaded not guilty,wanted a new annual tax on
personal wealth to ‘ensure that the
richest 100,000 of the population
make a fair and proper contribu-
tion to tax revenue’.
Yet he was careful to keep his
family’s money out of the
Treasury’s hands. Steps were
taken to minimise death-duty bills.
Land Registry records show he
transferred part-ownership of a
property to three of his children
after his wife died.
Ed and David Miliband also used
sophisticated — and perfectly legal
— financial planning schemes to
reduce the inheritance tax bill in
advance of their father’s death.
Meanwhile, Shadow Foreign
Secretary Emily Thornberry and
her husband, Sir Christopher
Nugee, made a profit of £500,000
through the purchase of a former
housing association property in
London which was then occupied
by her brother.
The three-storey townhouse was
bought for £572,000 during a
release of social housing stock
onto the private market, even
though Thornberry’s Labour Party
is strongly opposed to such sales.
Thornberry previously became
embroiled in a row about double
standards after she sent her
children to a selective school
despite Labour’s hostility to
selection in education.
‘I celebrate her good sense as a
parent and deplore her hypocrisy
as a politician,’ commented Chris
Woodhead, the Chief Inspector of
Schools, at the time.
The fact is that parental choice
brings out some of the worst
examples of hypocrisy among
Labour politicians.
For example, Shadow Attorney
General Shami Chakrabarti
criticised grammar schools without
revealing that she sent her son to
one of the most elite private
schools in the country, £18,000-a-
year Dulwich College.
The elder stateswoman of Labour
feminism, Harriet Harman, also
sent her eldest son to a selective
school in defiance of Labour policy.
Diane Abbott was highly critical,
saying Harman ‘had made the
Labour Party look as if we do onething and say another’. But the
same Diane Abbott sent her own
son to the private £10,000-a-year
City of London School, despite
having said ‘private schools prop
up the class structure of society’.
Abbott conceded that she had
been ‘inconsistent’ and her
behaviour was ‘indefensible’,
adding: ‘West Indian mums will go
to the wall for their children.’
Most shamefully, during the
Westminster expenses scandal, all
the MPs who went to prison were
from the Labour side. The lesson
from history, especially that of the
Soviet Union, is that attachment
to the socialist creed is no bar to
corrupting self-enrichment.
It’s not just individuals in the
Labour Party who are guilty.D
ESPITE Labour MPs’
rage against corporate
tax-dodgers, the party’s
headquarters in London
is reportedly rented through a tax-
exempt trust fund based in Jersey.
Last year, despite revenues of
£57 million and a bank surplus of
£1.4 million, Labour paid no
corporation tax.
As for its own employment
practices, Labour bosses — who
wail about poverty pay, exploita-
tion and job insecurity — are
hardly model managers.
Last year, one employee, based in
the party’s National Communica-
tions Centre, complained about
staffers being employed for as little
as 12 hours a week and having to
use food banks.
This summer, party staff threat-
ened to strike over low pay and
‘ruthless management’.
As party leader, Ed Miliband
denounced zero hours contracts,
though his campaign against them
fell flat when it emerged that 62
Labour MPs were using them.
It might be easier to take such
cant if socialists such as Abbott,
Thornberry and McDonnell were
not so pious, so full of superiority.
They paint themselves as
guardians of virtue and fighters
against social injustice. But their
hypocrisy shows they have no right
to the moral high ground.FROM PAGE 16