The housing minister who helped introduce the Right to Buy scheme propelled his family into real estate magnates in the latest evidence that cronyism has been alive and well in the Tory Party for several decades.
Mirror reports from 2013 detail how property tycoon Charles Gow and his wife ended up owning at least 40 ex-council properties on a single South London estate.
His father Ian Gow was one of Thatcher’s top aides and was housing minister during the peak years of right-to-buy.
The multi-millionaire son of a Tory minister who presided over the controversial “right-to -buy” scheme became a buy-to-let landlord owning scores of former council flats.
An investigation carried out at the time found a third of ex-council homes sold in the 1980s under Margaret Thatcher were now owned by private landlords, pointing to the severe housing shortage we have today.
In one London borough, the 2013 investigation found, almost half of ex-council properties are now sub-let to tenants..
Boss Paul Kenny said: “You couldn’t make it up. The family of one of the Tory ministers who oversaw right-to-buy ends up owning swathes of ex-council homes.”
Ian Gow was Mrs Thatcher’s parliamentary private secretary between 1979 and 1983.
Right-to-buy peaked in 1984, by which time he was Housing Minister.
He was killed in 1990 by an IRA car bomb.
Land Registry records show his son began buying properties in Sherfield Gardens in Putney, south east London, in 1996 for £100,000 each.
They are now believed to be worth many times more than that in one of the most affluent boroughs in London.
