Mary Reid

The Surrey Comet has the story about Zac Goldsmith's 'illegal' donation to the Richmond Park Conservative Association. Goldsmith is their parliamentary candidate, and the Electoral Commission is investigating the allegation that he gave them £7000 when he was not on the electoral register, which is not allowed under electoral law.

So the Richmond Park Tories will probably lose the £7000.

But what intrigues me more about this story is the news that multi-millionaire Zac Goldsmith has (allegedly - we know about his father's run-ins with Private Eye) ploughed £90,000 of his own money into his campaign to win the seat from Susan Kramer MP. It seems he has set up an office with two staff.

This is way beyond the resources available to the vast majority of candidates, who have to rely on small personal donations and fundraising social events to cover their costs.

Now I have always believed that we are fortunate in the UK in the way we run elections with a strict cap on the amount of money that can be spent by candidates. In the States, of course, election campaigning is all about raising millions of dollars for the White House race, or even hundreds of thousands to stand a chance of being elected as a State Representative. And if you get elected then you immediately start raising the huge sums needed to get re-elected in four years time.

The one catch in the UK is that the limit on expenditure only applies during the short period after an election is formally called. There are no restrictions on what can be spent between elections.

So, the question is quite simple. Is it fair that one candidate can spend very large sums from their personal wealth outside the election period?