Zac Goldsmith and the £250,000 question

How long is David Cameron's patience with Zac Goldsmith going to hold out? Already in the soup over his non-dom tax status - he had to admit last week that part of his £300m inheritance is kept offshore - and his distaste for the Sun newspaper, which he gave vent to only days after the paper had announced it would be supporting the Conservative party, Goldsmith is in trouble again.

Now it turns out that Cameron's adviser on green issues has donated a stunning £264,000 since 2007 to the local Conservative party in Richmond Park where he moved (from Chelsea) so he could live in the constituency he intends to win for the Tories from the Lib Dems in the upcoming general election.

According to reports, the Electoral Commission is having to investigate the Goldsmith payments because two of them may have been against the rules, having been being paid in December 2007 when Zac's name was not on the electoral register.

There is nothing illegal about donating money to your local Tory party - as long as you are on the electoral roll - but the sums involved are normally a couple of quid, not quarter of a million.

Goldsmith, who inherited his fortune on the death of his billionaire industrialist father James Goldsmith, has decided to solve the non-dom issue by promising Cameron to change his tax status to that of mere domiciled mortals.

But the donations, whether against or within the rules, once again suggest a young man - he's 34 - who lives somewhere beyond the horizon of those Lib Dem voters he has to win over if he's going to return Richmond Park to the Tories.

The fact that he's an Old Etonian to boot  - given Gordon Brown's recent quip about Tory policy being dreamed up on "the playing fields of Eton" and Labour's promise to hammer away at the Tory toff issue until the election - doesn't help. The Mole's sources suggest Cameron is ruing the day he was won over by Zac. ·