David Cameron promised last night to repay £22,000 of expenses if he is found by the Tory scutiny panel to have behaved unreasonably over his mortgage arrangements.
The Conservative leader is to be examined by the panel over a £350,000 interest-only mortgage that he took out to buy a house in Oxfordshire when he became an MP in 2001.
The panel will have to decide whether it was reasonable for Mr Cameron to have paid off separately £75,000 from his London home mortgage four months after buying the Oxford property, rather than using the sum to reduce his taxpayer-funded loan. Had Mr Cameron done so, it is estimated that he could have saved the taxpayer about £22,000 in mortgage payments.
In an interview with Channel