Another billionaire has fled Britain but it's the middle classes who will pay

With surprisingly little fanfare, David Reuben has left the building. In fact, he's done more than that – he's left the whole country and the effect of his departure will mean that all of us will be poorer.

For David is that rarest of people – he can make money. He sees opportunity where others only see problems.

Educated at a state school in Islington some seventy years ago, he and his brother Simon have created personal wealth of £28billion.

But billionaire David, 88, has said farewell to his Holland Park mansion and headed to Monaco, where there's no income tax, no capital gains tax and probably, for David, most importantly, no inheritance tax. Who could blame him?

He joins a huge exodus of the extremely wealthy heading by private jet for the door, only matched by a huge influx of the skint heading here by boat.

Not only do we lose Mr Reuben's brains and energy, but we face one other problem: who on God's earth will fix the tax hole he leaves behind?

Inevitably, the tax bill will mainly fall on the middle classes as the rich are able to depart to the welcoming arms of Monaco and the skint don't pay tax anyway.

Always makes me laugh when political polls show a majority will be happy to pay more in taxes for the NHS etc, the reality being the majority have had no interaction with HMRC and aren't likely to.

It can only be a matter of time before the Sunday Times Rich List is replaced by the Sunday Times Skint List, with the top of the pile being a bloke who has a record number of shoplifting offences, CCJs coming out his ears and hasn't paid his rent for eleven years.

There is a serious problem with Burnham and Co driving out the wealthy. Where are the tax revenues going to come from?

Only the other week a hedge fund manager, Chris Rokos, left for Greece. Last year he paid £330million in tax. I repeat that £330million. That's the equivalent of the tax paid by 38,000 average earners.

We can't afford to let these people go. Labour's idea is to charge them to leave the country. All that would do is stop the financially clever from ever bringing their ideas here.

No, we should do the opposite. We should go back to the old non-doms idea, axed by that idiot Rachel Reeves. Whatever happened to her? There must be a minimum-pay job waiting for her to welcome the skint to the Hackney branch of Santander.

Under the old non-dom scheme, which had worked happily for years, they only paid tax on the money they earned here and any dividends or interest they earned around the world they received without tax.

What's wrong with keeping the rich happy and settled here? Without thinking, we are spending billions on people without a penny (or a passport!) from faraway lands. So that's okay, but if the wealthy who are supplying billions to HMRC get some kicker, Labour think it's an outrage.

I have said before, and I say again, I love seeing the mansions and cars owned by the rich. I'm sure the estate agents and the car dealers love selling them. It keeps people employed. It keeps them paying tax.

So, I say a fond farewell to David Reuben. Over the years, he and his brother have given a fortune to educational, health, child and other causes.

And in 2019 their foundation gave £80million to Oxford University to establish Reuben College, its first new college in more than 30 years.

Delighted that their name lives on. Appalled that, after seven decades, David felt he couldn't make the United Kingdom his final resting place.

All because Socialists hate success. They would rather drive people out with their tax policies than leave a little on the table for the rich so that the rest of us didn't have to fill the bucket.

The good news is that come 2029, Burnham and his chums will be thrown out and the Reubens of this world will be welcomed back.