The Chancellor of the Exchequer doesn't understand Tax Law

Freedom of Information law is brilliant! It allows ordinary people to ask questions of the powerful and get solid answers.

Sometimes these questions are sensible and journalistic. Sometimes they're vexatious. Sometimes they're a little silly.

The silly ones can be fun to answer. It's a good chance for a politician to show their human side. It's pretty hard to get wrong. I mean, unless the question is "What's the Minister's favourite pop song?" and they answer "I'm the Leader of the Gang by Garry Glitter".

Someone has send an FoI request asking:

Please, could you tell me the chancellor's preferred brand and type of biscuit?

Ah! That's a brilliant question. An absolute home-run for any politician. Unless, to mix your metaphors, you score an own goal.

The official response says:

We can confirm that the Rt Hon Jeremy Hunt MP, Chancellor of the Exchequer, has a preference for Jaffa Cakes

This is despicable!

The UK's tax revenue office, HMRC, fought McVities (manufacturer of Jaffa Cakes) at a VAT tribunal in 1991. The crux of the case was this: chocolate covered biscuits attract VAT, chocolate covered cakes do not. Are Jaffa Cakes biscuits?

The answer?

The leading case on the borderline is that concerning Jaffa cakes: United Biscuits (LON/91/0160). Customs and Excise had accepted since the start of VAT that Jaffa cakes were zero-rated as cakes, but always had misgivings about whether this was correct. Following a review, the department reversed its view of the liability. Jaffa cakes were then ruled to be biscuits partly covered in chocolate and standard-rated: United Biscuits (as McVities, one of the largest manufacturers of Jaffa cakes) appealed against this decision. Taking all these factors into account, Jaffa cakes had characteristics of both cakes and biscuits, but the tribunal thought they had enough characteristics of cakes to be accepted as such, and they were therefore zero-rated. VFOOD6260 - Excepted items: Confectionery: The bounds of confectionery, sweets, chocolates, chocolate biscuits, cakes and biscuits: The borderline between cakes and biscuits

Jaffa Cakes are not biscuits. The law says so!

Now, Hunt isn't the first politician to make this mistake - First Minister of Scotland Nicola Sturgeon also made the same dubious claim. But, unlike Hunt, she presumably wasn't steeped in the day-to-day minutiae of tax affairs.

There's a serious point to my ramblings. It's always easy to give an off-the-cuff answer to a trivial question. But there'll always be some know-it-all who treats a lack of precision as evidence of a deep moral or intellectual failing. This is the reason why public figures are (usually) so guarded about their answers and have everything triple checked by professionals. It's easy for a slip of the tongue or a colloquialism to be aggressively misinterpreted.

Just as I am doing here.