Tuesday, August 10, 2004 AD
"I think you can trust me to know how to handle a taxman"
From Mark Steyn's obituary for the Duke of Devonshire, whose home, Chatsworth, became one of Britain's biggest tourist attractions, despite it having looked likely he would have to sell it to pay death duties amounting to 80% of his inheritance, following his father's death in 1955:
The 11th duke considered his options and determined to save what had been his family's home for four centuries. He sold the Holbein, and a Rembrandt, and the family's prized Anglo-Saxon manuscript, the Benedictional of Saint Ethelwold.
And then he set about playing for time and discovered that the notorious indolence of an effete aristocracy was nothing alongside the bureaucratic inertia of socialist tax collectors. He carefully noted how long the Inland Revenue took to reply to his letters, and made a point of taking as long to reply to theirs less one day. By this method, which the Revenue never noticed, he dragged out the final settlement of death duties for seventeen years.
