Tory mayoral candidate might as well have said ‘let them eat cake’ by claiming the homeless can ‘save’ for a house deposit

‘I don’t think the £5,000 will [be a problem]’ says out of touch Shaun Bailey, as those living in sheltered accommodation can’t even afford basic provisions

Shaun Bailey is the Conservative’s London Mayoral candidate  (Getty Images)

The only certainties are death, taxes and Tory candidates saying unbelievably crass and stupid things. The world might be falling apart, but we can still rely on all three.

You've probably guessed that I’m going to be focussing on the third of those, the latest example of which is a real doozy.

Today’s Tory twerp isn’t the usual pinstriped patsy from the shires, desperately seeking to make some noise having realised their career topped out with three months as a ministerial bag-carrier, while Gavin Williamson’s somehow still in the cabinet.

No, it’s Shaun Bailey, the party’s bright young hope to shock the world by ousting Sadiq Kahn as mayor of London.

The city he wants to run has 62,670 households in temporary accommodation, 44,190 of them with children, which is more than double the figure for the rest of the country combined.

It’s a problem created by the capital’s chronic lack of public housing.

So what’s Bailey plan to do about it? Interviewed by Inside Housing, he expounded on his plans to use his housing budget to build thousands of new shared ownership properties.

Asked how they would help those families, given that they typically require deposits of perhaps £5,000 a go plus a mortgage, he said: “I don’t think the £5,000 will [be a problem]. The mortgage application thing might be a bit tougher… They could save for it, yeah.”

I know there is a certain sort of Londoner that turns a blind eye to anything going on north of the Watford Gap, but even those people can’t have missed Manchester United footballer Marcus Rashford’s remarkably effective campaign against food poverty.

The sort of people suffering from that are, you’ve got it, very often the sort of people left living in temporary accommodation through the lack of an alternative.

If they had the means to pay for something better then they’d take it, it’s just that when you’re sharing a B&B with hungry children, and putting food on the table is a priority over toiletries and warm clothing for yourself, setting money aside to fund an impossible dream.

Bailey’s comments aren’t quite on a level with the party’s worst housing-related gaffe. The gold medal still belongs to former minister George Young’s infamous “the homeless are what you step over when you come out of the opera” line.

But they’re still spectacularly out of touch from the capital’s top Tory and a guy whom David Cameron – remember him? – employed as a special advisor on youth and crime.

What he said was really the latter-day equivalent of Marie Antoinette’s “let them eat cake”.

In this case the cake comes in the form of properties you part own part rent if you can’t get a mortgage to fully cover the cost of buying one of London’s exorbitantly priced homes.

For some they’re a step onto the home ownership ladder but critics point out they can leave owner/tenants with the worst of all worlds, stuck in properties they only part own and are supposed to maintain, while also finding the money for exorbitant service charges.

Regardless, they’re not the sort of housing that London and other urban areas in this country is in dire need of, which is affordable rental homes for the millions of Britons who are never going to pass the affordability tests lenders require before advancing even small mortgages, assuming they can, I don’t know, pull off a bank job to get deposits they can’t afford to save for.

Bailey has had a history of questionable public statements in the past and this is another example.

Still I suppose it’s got him some attention, which is what it’s all about when you’re trailing a pin-striped City boy (Brian Rose) running as an independent in the betting. The latter has been using his widely followed YouTube channel to rant about lockdowns.

You’d think capital would have learned its lesson after giving Boris Johnson two terms, but Rose is currently priced at as low as 7-2 by oddsmakers, an implied probability of just over 20 per cent.

He actually makes Bailey look somewhat palatable, but the problem is that a sensible and credible opposition is a key requirement of good governance and Rose’s status as the clear second favourite tells you that the capital is rather lacking that.