Second article allowance

There’s some really cheap journalistic ripping-off going on here. Glen Owen in the Mail on Sunday and Jamie Lyons in the News of the World write about David Cameron’s second home in his Witney constituency. I’ve blended the pieces together so you can see exactly, sentence by sentence, how feebly the wording has been changed:

MoS: By nominating it as his second home, he was able to claim for the mortgage interest payments under the now-infamous Commons’ Additional Costs Allowance (ACA).
NotW: By naming it as his second home he was able to claim around £20,000 a year for the mortgage interest payments under the now-discredited second home allowance.

MoS: Just four months after securing the £350,000 mortgage, Mr Cameron paid off the £75,000 loan on his London home, taken out only six years earlier.
NotW: Yet just four months after securing the mortgage he paid off a £75,000 loan on his London home, which he had taken out six years earlier.

MoS: There is no suggestion that he broke any rules.
NotW: There is no suggestion he broke the rules.

MoS: But mortgage experts say that if he had kept the loan on his London home and borrowed £75,000 less on the Oxfordshire property, taxpayers could have been saved more than £22,000 between 2002 and 2007.
NotW: But if he had KEPT the loan on his London home and borrowed £75,000 LESS on his Oxfordshire home, mortgage experts say he could have saved taxpayers over £22,000.

Shoddy. On the substance, the Tories deny any wrongdoing – see the MoS story for details. I lack the nous to adjudicate, but just wanted to point out how crap some journalism is.