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What David Cameron did and didn't pay in tax, in one graph

Dan Kitwood/Getty Images
Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

At the end of a week from hell for the Prime Minister, on Sunday David Cameron granted everyone permission to root through the nitty gritty of his tax returns by publishing them online.

One major bombshell to come out of that decision was the revelation that his mother Mary had given the PM a gift of £200,000 after the death of his father in 2010, a move which would have allowed the family to bypass inheritance tax.

Taxes are a-changin'

The threshold for inheritance tax is set to rise from £325,000 to £500,000 next year, as Chancellor George Osborne announced last July.

Meanwhile Cameron's returns reveal he paid £56,155 tax on £157,286 income in his first year in the prime ministerial hotseat - as this chart from Statista shows.

Graph: Statista

This rose to £75,898 from £200,307 in the year 2014/15.

In the year the Tories announced the top rate of tax was to be cut from 50p to 45p per pound (2013), Cameron paid just £76,288 from a £200,735 income - saving himself a nifty £5,000 in the process.

Comfortably in the black

According to the reports, Cameron has earned a total of nearly £1.1million in the past six years, and has paid about £400,000 in income tax.

With politicians across the land being chivvied into publishing their own tax returns, a news story which continues to play out like the world's most boring game of Top Trumps shows no sign of abating.

More: James O’Brien just nailed the difference between Tory and Labour reactions to the tax scandal

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