I lost my house after HMRC sent me a £400,000 tax bill. After nine nightmare years as a renter, I’m finally back on the property ladder… though my garden is full of gravestones, writes LIZ JONES

Even when I’ve been told by my solicitor that I can pick up the keys to my new house from the estate agent in Darlington, County Durham, I’m convinced something will go wrong.

They will tell me it has all been a mistake. The money never materialised, it was lost, scammed. I have three collies in my car. Their eyes are shining, and I feel so responsible for them. Despite it being April, the rain is torrential, freezing. We cannot be homeless. Not again.

Finally, the estate agent runs out to my car and hands me the keys. ‘Congratulations!’ she says. That’s what everyone says when I tell them I have clambered back on to the property ladder. It’s a good thing! A rite of passage, like getting married or having a baby. Me? I can barely believe it. I never, ever thought I would own a house again.

Liz Jones outside her new house, which is a former vicarage. ‘The house is surrounded by ancient gravestones, which I imagine is why it’s such a bargain,’ she writes

My darkest moment was in 2015, sitting in the offices of my insolvency lawyers near Bristol, along with my debt management consultant and my (new) accountant.

My bankruptcy was owing to a tsunami of events, from being sacked, buying a house next to a convicted stalker and an incompetent accountancy firm who charged me £3,000 a month to mess up my books. I was a sole trader: if I’d had a limited company, I could have walked away from my debts, but instead I had to sell my house to pay everyone; no one was left out of pocket.

As everything was stripped from me, I squeaked a question. ‘Will I ever be able to buy a house again? Something for, say, £200,000?’

They laughed. ‘Never,’ the debt solutions lady said. ‘HMRC want you to live in a hole.’

Going bankrupt takes years, and I would say the process is worse than when it finally happens. I would walk my dogs, not knowing if when I got back to my house it would be strewn with tape, doors boarded up.

The crippling fear makes you unable to fight back, explain, stick up for yourself. The lawyers have golf clubs at the ready, ski trips booked while you sob in front of them. I felt this each time they attended a meeting, even those on my side!

I would be charged for their expenses: me, who had nothing. Even the official receiver (a civil servant appointed by the court to divvy up assets) appeared to mock me, saying my beautiful house, with a lawn sloping down to the River Swale, dotted with kingfishers and herons, ‘has a very small kitchen’.

I felt that they simply didn’t want to see a single, high-profile woman in a lovely home. They made assumptions that I was profligate because I went to Paris to attend fashion shows, not understanding that it was my job.

As I was bankrupt, they were able to bar me from investing in a pension, or health and life insurance. I became a non-person, with no rights at all. I had to hide that I have dogs and, at that time, two horses.

My first property, bought in 1983, was £35,000, in a slum clearance area in Brixton, South London. The interest rate was 15 per cent, the guarantor my dad, and I had to share the loan with a sister. I slowly worked my way up the property ladder.

Next, a teeny terraced cottage in Saffron Walden, Essex, for £90,000. Then, a one-bedroom former local authority flat in Old Street, East London for £93,000, way before it became fashionable.

Then a terrace house in nearby Hackney for around £300k on a road with the highest incidence of knife crime in Europe: I would come downstairs to find the back door jemmied open many times. I lived there for more than 11 years, becoming immune to the sound of police helicopters buzzing overhead. (That house is now up for sale for £1.3 million. Insane! I sold it in 2006, for £400,000, having done huge amounts of work on it.)

Liz with her dog inside her home. She says she has big plans for the vicarage, including a new kitchen, a downstairs loo, a courtyard garden full of only white flowers, and ferns

Liz, seen outside her  home, says: ‘I hope never, ever to have to move house again. And at least my funeral will be cheap. Someone can just roll me a few feet out of the front door to a grave’

By 2006, I had bought a Georgian house on a beautiful square in Islington, North London, with a mortgage of £1 million. The gay couple I bought it from remarked, when I moved in, that I had amazing furniture: Matthew Hilton sofa, arm chair and ottoman, a Vispring bed. A Terence Woodgate sofa for the basement kitchen. Mid-century classics.

I was such a cliche. I would wander from room to room, stroking things, standing on the balcony like the bloody queen. I had arrived!

All the years of 14-hour days with never a break to even go to the loo, long-haul flights, all the stress of being a journalist and a glossy magazine editor seemed, finally, worth it. I had been single all my life but now, in my early 40s, I was happy to share the house with my brand new husband.

Trouble is, he was jealous, chippy. When he cheated on me, threw my generosity and home back in my face, it ruined everything for me. I wanted to escape. Walking through my neighbourhood, the pavement packed with couples laughing and holding hands, I felt I couldn’t stand being there any more, now that I was all alone.

And so I made a huge mistake and bought a 50-acre farm in Somerset for £1.6 million: a home for my cats, and my newly rescued racehorse and pony.

I grew up in Essex, but this didn’t prepare me for living on the edge of Exmoor. I wrote off my BMW in a flood. I ran out of oil for the blasted Aga on New Year’s Eve. The garden was so big, I had to employ a gardener: I didn’t realise that when it snows and he doesn’t turn up, you don’t have to pay him. No wonder the locals took me for a fool.

In a fit of largesse, I invited my sister and her young son to live with me. I did up a derelict barn for her. We fell out, and so I took out another £275,000 loan to buy her a cottage, and sold the farm to scrape together her deposit. I relocated to Yorkshire and bought a Swaledale mini-mansion for just under a million that I would eventually lose to HMRC. It came with a cottage, which housed my assistant/animal carer, so when I lost my home she did too.

I was working so hard, abroad for long stretches of time, paying for weeks in hotels before claiming it back, that I took my eye off the ball. I remember driving across the Pennines to the coast near Liverpool to interview the tenor Alfie Boe when my accountant called to tell me I owed HMRC £400,000 plus a backlog of VAT. At that point, I considered allowing the car to swerve off the road, down the mountainside. I still did the interview; Alfie Boe had no clue of my state of mind. I learned to mask the sick terror.

I took part in Celebrity Big Brother, seeing not a penny of the £250,000 fee, as it all went on my tax bill plus my agent’s 20 per cent commission. When I left my Swaledale house for the last time, to rent near the market town of Richmond, in earshot of the A1, I tried really hard to be positive.

The rental house cost £1,700 a month, but I was grateful to the owners who allowed my dogs and cats (so many don’t).

However, I was soon enmired in rules: put your car in the garage, keep dogs on a lead, put your furniture in storage (insanely expensive; I ended up selling everything on ebay, even my 40-year collection of Vogue, at tragic losses).

When that house was put up for sale for way more than I could ever afford, I then rented a tiny cottage without heating, which I paid to install: I’ve spent £59,000 in total. I recall the day I moved in, and a cupboard door fell on my head. I broke down and cried.

In Richmond in the Dales (Rishi Sunak is my MP), or anywhere beautiful, a decent home is inevitably a holiday let; North Yorkshire also has the highest concentration of second homes in England. Any mooted planning restrictions or increased costs for those renting out furnished properties for a short term are too little too late, for me anyway.

I became obsessed with my credit score on Experian, which slowly climbed to 95 per cent, checking it almost daily (being poor costs money: to access your score costs £14.99 a month).

I filled in endless, invasive forms, and applied for a mortgage. I was always told: wait six years since being discharged from bankruptcy, five years, four. I watched in terror as, with Liz Truss in power, interest rates soared. My rented cottage was put up for sale, and I endured snakes of potential buyers peering in cupboards, ignoring me completely as a non-person, a tenant.

The vicarage cost just £295,000. ‘Maybe people think it’s haunted,’ Liz writes

That is what smarts the most, I think, our lack of status and legal protection. Watching the BBC’s Interior Design Masters the other night, I was hurt to hear the presenter, introducing the next task, say: ‘How to help those in temporary accommodation.’

Why is a rented house always called ‘accommodation’? Why is it always ‘temporary’? I grew up in a rented vicarage: my parents had seven children, and couldn’t afford to buy somewhere with enough bedrooms (I still had to share a room with two sisters). But my dad, a retired captain in the Army, duly mowed the lawn, painted the high ceilings. I don’t think he felt shame, or at least he never said. My mum polished the wooden floors on her knees.

It makes me see red when articles in the property sections of broadsheet newspapers denigrate renters. A recent news story was about a woman who returned to her home after living in the U.S., and a divorce, to find the garden ‘neglected by tenants’.

We aren’t all bad. My god, I barely dared breathe while renting in case the owner turned up: you have no privacy. It’s particularly galling when you are in your 60s: as Polly Neate, chief executive of Shelter, told me: ‘With home ownership an impossibility and a drought in social housing, older people are now trapped in expensive and unstable private renting.

‘We regularly hear from people in their 60s and older who are scrambling to cope with spiralling rents in often shoddy private rentals instead of enjoying the safety and stability we all need in old age.’

Despite government promises, the law on no-fault (Section 21) evictions has not been changed. I recently read a news item about a woman, evicted in her 80s, forced into a hostel. There must be a better solution.

I finally managed to get my credit score up to a near perfect 100 but I am now 65, which means the maximum term of a loan is ten years, making repayments expensive. All the while I have been browsing Rightmove, inigo.com and themodernhouse.com, dreaming of how happy I would be if I lived somewhere I owned.

After losing my home, I would see lights on in windows, families cooking, fire lit, and feel insanely jealous. Why do they have a home, and I don’t? I finally chanced upon a vicarage for sale, not far from where I rent land and a yard for my surviving horse.

It was once a spa town, with a railway station, meaning all the houses are Georgian and very grand, surrounding a protected green. I went to view it on the first day it went on sale, falling in love with the church next door, the stone staircase, the skylight, the huge windows and fireplaces, the view of the river from what will be my office.

I put in an offer, barely able to believe it cost just £295,000. Maybe people think it’s haunted. The house is surrounded by ancient gravestones, which I imagine is why it’s such a bargain. They don’t bother me. One thing the past 15 years has taught me is that it isn’t the dead who might harm you, it’s the vultures, circling, keen to pick your bones dry.

Liz says she does one day want to share the vicarage with someone

Opening the front door, I felt the stress of being watched, of being a failure, of belonging to a sub-class melt away. I could put anything anywhere! I could shut the front door and feel safe.

Of course, it has been terrifying, as I have lost all my confidence. I know the worst can happen. I look back at 2023, my annus horribilis when I lost my collie, Gracie, to cancer, and my rescued pony to a burst tumour.

I lost my sister, Lynnie, just before Christmas. She never owned a home, living first in a London bedsit, then a rented house in the suburbs of Sydney that she hated. I now have a spare room, and I only wish she was still alive so that she could come and stay. Oh my God, I can have a friend to stay now!

The shame of renting, the uncertainty, the stigma, the way we are written about in the media, affects every corner of your life.

I watch Married At First Sight, the bit where your partner sees where and how you live for the first time, and I realise our homes are intrinsic to our self-worth, our attractiveness. The thing is, ending up in a rental can happen to anyone: divorce, illness, redundancy, bad luck.

I have big plans for the vicarage — a new kitchen, a downstairs loo, a courtyard garden full of only white flowers, and ferns; when you rent, you think very hard before you plant anything — but I think for now I will sit back and take my time.

I feel more stable, positive, and I’ve returned to my old ritual of walking from room to room, stroking things lovingly. Every time I do a piece of work, it will go towards my future and not into someone else’s pocket.

I realise, finally starting to breathe — and sleep! — that the constant tension from renting has affected my mental health: I have been on edge, so careful that I would never hang pictures in case the nail left a mark. I’m tired of taking photos of meters, sending readings, booking removal vans, cleaning, cleaning, cleaning someone else’s mess.

Now, I feel like a grown-up. If the boiler breaks, I’ll get it fixed: there is something infantilising about having to ask your landlord.

I do one day want to share the vicarage with someone, but am wary given what transpired in the past. I hope never, ever to have to move house again. And at least my funeral will be cheap. Someone can just roll me a few feet out of the front door to a grave. No way am I leaving this house anything other than feet first!