Totty Watch: Troughers daughter

Lib Dem Andrew George MP has apparently

claimed 300k for a flat

for his model/parliamentary intern daughter.

TB wouldn't be surprised if other MPs have done this for their kids and more of this sort of thing will come out after deeper scrutiny. Doubt they will all be this fit though.

+++Telegraph out+++MING+++

Here.

Update +++

MING CAMPBELL

+++

+++developing+++

Don't Foulke with me buddy.

Now some of you will remember that TB isn't the biggest fan of Lord George Foulkes. He never fails to anger TB and his appearance on Sky News earlier where he basically said it was a big public school conspiracy against the Speaker was no exception. Despite the fact that

he is the last person

in the whole of Westminster/Holyrood/Labour/Edinburgh to be lecturing the taxpayer about expenses, he did get TB thinking about the BBC earlier.

Foulkes is a canny operator and would have prepared the

elephant trap

he set for Carrie Gracie over how much she is paid. And lets not forget that she technically is a public servant, just like an MP shouldn't we have a look at her expenses account too?

And while we are at it lets look at Nick Robinson's too. He hasn't exactly stuck the knife in has he? Infact all of the BBC reporting has been rather mute compared to Sky.

Stephen Fry completely missed the point last night when he said that journos were rich to talk about expenses. No doubt they are dreadful at it, but TB doesn't give a damn what some hack charges a private company. The BBC expenses however are on the taxpayer.

Let's blow the lid off Pandora's second box.

How dare they?

In solidarity Tory Bear will now be boycotting Easyjet:

“We have a strict baggage allowance on all our flights and this bear was not a small bear”

- an Easyjet spokesman, responding to a mother who criticised Easyjet for stopping her 6-year-old daughter taking her teddy bear on a flight because it was classed as “excess baggage”. Alba Aprciado-Peris was told by a check-in worker that Bebe the bear was banned from joining her on the flight from Glasgow to Stansted.

Outrageous.

Hat-Tip:

LFAT

In Dave we trust...

"So Michael Gove will pay back the £7,000 claimed for furniture.
Oliver Letwin will pay back the £2,000 for the pipe under his tennis court.
Andrew Lansley will pay back the £2,600 for home improvements.
Alan Duncan will pay back nearly £5,000 for gardening expenses.
Francis Maude will no longer claim any money for his second home in London.
And neither will Chris Grayling.
Theresa Villiers - the only London MP in the shadow cabinet – will follow suit later this year."

Ball kicked over to the reds.

Ssssh.

Charlotte Gore

is gearing up for the Lib Dems turn in the Telegraph spotlight tomorrow, especially Lord Rennard:

"We already have some clues about what to expect. Here’s a name that’s not especially well known outside of LD circles, but within he has practically messianic status as the mastermind of our entire approach to campaigning. I don’t think we’ve heard the last of this."

Trust TB Charlotte, the country will know name Chris Rennard very soon...

And not because of his financial misdemeanors.

Our finest hour...

Last night's

revelations in the Telegraph

didn't exactly make for the finest hour in the history of the Conservative Party. Even in the darkest days of sexual sleaze and brown envelopes, the Tories have always been pro-taxpayer rather than pro-taxing, yet some MPs have treated our covenant with the hard working people of this country with utter contempt. But, a dawn will always follow even the darkest night. Better some of this deadwood is cleared out now rather than have them troughing for another five years and causing all sorts of chaos for a Cameron government. Firm action must be taken now and no doubt there is many an A-lister out there today eyeing up one or two very safe, soon to be vacant, seats.

In the words of

Prodicus

: "This country desperately needs the Conservative Party to be in government, to get it back on its feet. Save the ship, Dave, with a skeleton crew if necessary. Urgently. Make this your finest hour to date. Lead."

Mrs Whippy

How did Tory Bear not know this very funny yet ultimately useless piece of trivia before?

Via

@joshmacalister

did you know that Margaret Thatcher

helped to invent

Mr Whippy ice cream?

Oh you did? Nevermind then. Just imagine laughing when you heard that for the first time.

CCHQ bracing themselves...

According to

Jonathon Isaby

:

"all queries about backbenchers should be directed to the individuals concerned"

Damn straight.

Guest Post - Troughing all over the world...

TB has another exam tomorrow so he thought he would throw open the floor for a guest post. Stuart MacLennan is Labour's Parliamentary Candidate for

Moray

and here he offers some thoughts on the expenses farce:

There can be little doubting the public outrage over the issue of MPs expenses. Recently I’ve been campaigning extensively for the forthcoming Euro elections it’s quite clear that it’s the only issue anyone wants to talk about. MPs now find themselves in a quandary as to how to go about reforming expenses and have so far struggled to reach a consensus. But this surely cannot be a purely British dilemma? The following table contains a brief breakdown of how other comparable national legislatures deal with the issue of expenses:

US CONGRESS:
Representatives and Senators receive an annual salary of $174,000 (approx. £140,000).

Travel expenses calculated by a set formula.

Federal Income Tax allowance of up to $3000 for living expenses.


FRENCH NATIONAL ASSEMBLY:
Annual salary of €62,160 (approx. £55,000).

FREE first class rail travel anywhere in the country.

40 return flights per year between Paris and their Constituencies.

€69,480 (approx. £62,000) for living expenses, additional travel and entertainment.

Low-interest housing loans.


GERMAN BUNDESTAG:
Annual salary of €88068 (approx. £80,000)

€45,384 (approx.£40,000) for travel and living expenses.


By now I should imagine that anyone reading this blog is more than familiar with how things work in Westminster so I have omitted them from the table brevitatis causa. While I have included travel expenses they aren’t the central focus of the debate at hand and are worthy of a mere passing mention. Office and staffing allowances are largely irrelevant to this debate and I have therefore omitted them entirely.

The Americans, never ones for complexity, have gone for the very simple strategy of paying their Congressmen more. The income tax allowance doesn’t come remotely close to covering the cost of a second home in or around D.C., and certainly not hotel accommodation (The Senate typically sits between 100 and 150 days per year which is just slightly below the 165 days the Commons sat last year). With no expenses for second homes it’s little wonder that Joe Biden spent 36 years commuting over two hours back to Delaware and pocketing the cash.

On the face of it the French seem somewhat more frugal with their Deputies receiving a salary in the region of £10k less that our MPs. However when you consider that all the travel they could ever possibly manage is provided gratis the £62,000 living allowance makes for one heck of a lavish lifestyle (perhaps most of it disappears under the heading ‘entertainment’?) This allowance seems all the more generous when coupled with the extremely low-interest loans that are on offer for Deputies to buy second homes.

German MPs, being every bit as un-nuanced as the Americans, have a fairly simple system of allowances, with travel and living expenses being lumped together in a package more modest than their French counterparts but they make up for it with their more generous salaries.

When compared with the United Kingdom it could in fact be argued that our MPs are comparatively hard done by. The Additional Costs Allowance of £24,000 seems a mere pittance when compared with the French allowance of £62,000.

So why is it that we in Britain are so outraged when by international standards our MPs aren’t anything like as well compensated by their foreign counterparts? Why is it that we seem more outraged by Jacqui Smith’s claim for a bath-plug than Oliver Letwin’s tennis court? I would suggest that the answer to this is in the way that this whole row has been handled rather than the claims themselves.

MPs went to the highest court in the land to prevent these claims from being published, which undoubtedly led us all to believe that what lies beneath mush be truly scandalous. Perhaps if MPs had more readily complied with the Freedom of Information laws they themselves passed then the public may have proved somewhat more forgiving.

It is also unfortunate too that the information was leaked to the Telegraph for a reportedly exorbitant sum ahead of the official release, allowing the Telegraph to cherry pick the most scandalous elements without allowing the rest of us to consider these claims in their proper context. Were we, the public, permitted access to this information then we may well have concluded that the vast majority of MPs are, in fact, not ‘on the take’ – with Alan Johnson’s exceptionally modest claims being one of the few good examples we have seen so far.

I’m not going to defend MPs like David Miliband and Alan Duncan who attempted to put a somewhat liberal interpretation on the rules. However sunshine is said to be the best disinfectant, and if party leaders aren’t shamed into removing the very worst offenders from their jobs then the electorate may soon do it for them.

Stuart blogs at

Hackwatch

. If you would like to write a guest post for torybear.com please do get in touch with TB.

Douglas Carswell goes for it...

The Shadow Minister of Sound

Douglas Carswell

has launched a full assault on the Speaker Michael Martin:

"I've drafted the text of a motion for the Speaker to quit, and to be replaced by a new Speaker with a mandate to clean up the Commons. I'm consulting the Commons Table Office for advice on it.
I'm also starting to canvass for support for it from colleagues."

TB has managed to get hold of some video footage of what Carswell has been up to today:



Members from both sides of the House should get behind this motion. Martin is a dead man walking. This happened on his watch and he should be the first to admit that.

Why is he still the Speaker?

How can trust be restored?

One of TB's readers has some very wise words:

labrat said...
Only way to regain this would be to announce that he "expects all local selection committees to make their own decisions, and that if someone has breached the trust of the electorate they should not be reselected to represent that seat"

Not a bad plan at all.

By Gove.

The Spectator

argue that the Telegraph might have jumped the gun with Michael Gove:

I know defending MPs is a hard sell right now, but Michael Gove seems to be getting an unfair rap in the coverage. He is under fire for having flipped his second home designation but he did so because he moved homes. In other words, the property that was his second home genuinely changed.

Gove discussed this in an interview with Fraser (he’ll have more on this soon) how he initially tried to live in his constituency full time and then found that simply was not possible with his work and family commitments so moved back to London. He has not sold any properties he brought with taxpayer-supported loans or anything like that so this strikes me as quite different from most of the other cases of flipping.

There was word out earlier in the afternoon that Gove was consulting lawyers and in light of this, that would figure. Gove is one of the brightest stars of the 2005 intake and his quick rise has reflected this. No doubt there is some deadwood in all the parties who have been lining their pockets for years, but Gove is an astute and extremely clever journalist/politician and TB was very surprised when his name was first mentioned today. It was odd to think he could have been so stupid or dishonest to attempt to con the taxpayer.

This reporting

by the Spectator seemingly vindicates Mr Gove. Yet more distance from Cameron's inner circle. Something that cannot be said for Brown.

Blood letting...

TB is back from the library and was just settling down to Sky News and some steak only to be greeted by bloody Sportsline. Arrrgh.

Well the

Telegraph

has well and truly blown the lid off Pandora's box. The Tories are now feeling the heat. TB isn't about to defend the indefensible, but, so far, it seems Cameron is clean. Would he really have just gone on TV if he was going to get done over tomorrow and not mention it?

This country is crying out for change and it is a shame that quite so many Shadow Cabinet faces have been drawn into this. Did no one ever stop to think, my god these receipts might one day see the light of day? People have been campaigning to see these receipts for nearly the entire length of this Parliament. Was that not enough of a give away that lining the pockets might not be acceptable?

No doubt the next couple of days will be hard for the Conservatives and the entire political bubble in this country is going to come under attack, but from the Telegraph's first edition it doesn't seem that the tories have been quite as brazen as their government equivalents. This is beside the point though. If any one of these allegations had come to light on an individual basis there would have been resignations, however the MPs are in a pack and there is safety in numbers. The fact that "they are all at it" so to speak, might mean that the worst of the troughers will survive in the short term. But within the year they will be tried and found wanton by about 65,0000 of their peers.

Calls for Parliament to be dissolved over this issue are growing and TB is ready to add his voice to this. It's the only way that the people can truly express their feelings about this issue and every single MPs expenses should be published, right now, and then their constituents should be allowed to decide the fate of their member.

Wonder what the Palace makes of all this? Time for the Queen to use her royal prerogative perhaps?

Trust the biggest political scandal that TB could even fathom to unfold right in the middle of his finals. To make matters worse he is revising with a knee the size of a watermelon and semi-delirious from a combination of codeine and Deep-Heat fumes. The third round of expenses revelations have been scrutinised all morning so here are some stories from the Sunday papers you may have missed...

• Obama takes on the Paparazzi and the Times as an interesting insight into "Brand Obama".

• Isn't it about time we had a few years without a Kennedy in the Senate?

• The race for one of the most prestigious academic post
  in the world turns dirty, very dirty.

• The Scotland on Sunday report on Cameron and the SNP.

• The Observer claim Damian Green has ditched his mole. Not cool if true.

• Tom Watson is a fat bastard. Proof.

• Matthew D'Ancona says its all too easy to blame the system in his Telegraph column.

• You know it's a really bad when Andrew Rawnsley turns on you.

And finally if you read one article from this post please let it be

this damning insight

into the world of Gordon Brown, the brutish thug. Seems Ray Collins lacks the spine of his predecessor Peter Watt.

Trot on.

James Gray should publicly apologise for

this

, and then ride far far away.

Money does not grow on trees...

The farce continues...



Hat-tip

Beau Bo D'Or

What a surprise.

The Sunday Telegraph is set to make uncomfortable reading for Mr and Mrs Balls apparently.

More at midnight.

23:31 Well nothing about Balls in the first edition and not sure what

this

is all about, but

brutal

for Labour none the less. More

intrigue about Hazel Blears

, is she being set up by NO10 to take the can back for the whole rotten bunch? 

+++developing+++

Intriguing...

Old Holborn

is plotting...

"If any of you is or knows of a friendly pig farmer with transport for 30 pigs who would be willing to be on national television, outside the Houses of Parliament next week, please contact me. This is a serious request."

Something tells TB that the image of piggies trotting past Big Ben could get a lot of attention...

Ouch...

"• Phil Woolas, the Home Office Minister, claimed for items of women's clothing, tampons and nappies. The parliamentary rules only allow expenses which are "exclusively" for MPs' own use so it is not clear these items were justified."

The Telegraph seems very keen to make amends for the smeargate mess.

Day 2

.