Author Archives: Mark Pack

In brief: read the Daily Mail. It has stories on Jacqui Lait (claiming £100,000 in second home expenses although her constituency is only 35 minutes drive from Westminster), the Wintertons (claiming costs for expensive alarm system that security experts say they don’t need) and Peter Oborne has more on Alan Duncan and whether he has properly declared his business links.

For a bit of variety, there’s also another Conservative (Philip Lardner) praising Rhodesia’s Ian Smith. Yup, that’s the Ian Smith who presided over whites-only rule, banning people from voting based on their skin colour. (The previous Conservative candidate to …

It’s Tom Wise, elected as a UKIP MEP, though chucked out last year.

Well, who’d have thought it? Yet another story involving Conservative Parliamentarians and mis-use of expenses:

Two Tory MPs, Sir Nicholas Winterton and his wife Ann, were in “unequivocal” breach of Parliamentary rules by claiming over £165,000 in rent on a property which they had bought outright, MPs have concluded.

The Wintertons’ family “benefited directly from the payment of rent”, which is “explicitly prohibited” under the rules, according to the Standards and Privileges Committee. They were alerted to this in February 2007 and “this should have been addressed.”

A report by MPs upheld the complaint against the long serving members for Macclesfield and Congleton,

…

With all the usual caveats about online polls of party supporters, the results of the latest Labour Home poll shows some interesting results when it comes to Gordon Brown:

How much time would you be prepared to give Gordon Brown to begin reversing Labour’s fortunes, before you would want him to step aside?

18%: He should resign now
28%: He should be given until September 2008 (conference) to turn things around
17%: He should be given until May 2009 (the Europeean & Local Elections) to turn things around
38%: He should lead the party into the next general election

A computer stolen from Hazel Blears’s constituency office has turned out to contain sensitive government information on defence and extremism. As the BBC reports, it isn’t yet clear if this means Hazel Blears broke any rules on the handling of government information, but given the rules against holding such information on personal computers, for example, it is hard to see how the data could have ended up on the computer without someone breaking some rules.

You see, Caroline Spelman said:

I accepted the opportunity to have part-time administrative and secretarial help from Tina Hayne because I had advertised my home as constituency office.

But then her home was neither in Westminster, nor in her constituency but in another part of the country completely – Kent. Did she really advertise this as her office? It will be interesting to see if anyone can produce evidence to show that. I’m sceptical but open to persuasion; if there’s evidence, let’s see it.

Hat tip: Ministry of Truth who has got other questions too.

UPDATE: Parliament’s Standards Commissioner, John Lyon, has announced this afternoon …

So writes Nick Clegg in today’s Times. He goes on to write,

In less than two weeks the fate of the people of Zimbabwe will be determined by the result of a run-off presidential election. If Robert Mugabe is allowed to steal that election the tragedy will be complete. The scale of the catastrophe that Mugabe has precipitated in his country is almost unimaginable. In just ten years, life expectancy has plummeted from 61 years to less than 36 – the lowest in the world. The economy has disintegrated – inflation by the official measure stood at 164,900 per cent in

…

Nick Clegg is making a major speech on education today, and it’s (already) getting some heavy coverage in the media:

Schools should be less constrained by the National Curriculum, Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat leader, says on Monday.

In a speech to the Centre Forum think-tank at the Microsoft headquarters in London, he will call for an end to the “one size fits all” approach to education.

He will call for the establishment of an education standards authority to tackle accusations of dumbing down by ensuring exams retain their gold standard.

Mr Clegg will also argue that the number of civil servants at the

…

Both issues featured heavily when Nick Clegg appeared on the Andrew Marr show this morning. You can watch it here.

Today’s Sunday Times headline sums it up:

Tories backtrack over Caroline Spelman’s payments to nanny

As more details are coming out, her initial defence is looking less and less sure. Although part of the initial defence was about how swamped she was when she became an MP and desparately needed someone – almost anyone – to help with her constituency work, it now turns out that far from being an urgent short-term patch-up post-election measure, the controversial payments actually went on for two years after the election.

As the Sunday Times says:

After the unusual arrangements were exposed earlier this month, Spelman issued

…

The Spectator writes:

It is especially damaging, then, to learn that Tory MEPs have pressed their noses deep in the European trough … What impresses no one is the conduct of Sir Robert Atkins, an MEP for the north-west … As far as Conservative party chairman Caroline Spelman is concerned, the nature of the secretarial duties supposedly performed by her former nanny during 1997/98 seem to get murkier by the day … A party which will campaign for the next election on tackling Labour’s gross misspending has no room for MPs who waste taxpayers’ money themselves. Any candidate who

…

From The Guardian on how Gordon Brown won last night’s vote on 42 days detention without trial:

It was privately acknowledged the DUP had also pushed for a financial package to lift the burden of new water charges, speed up asset sales and exclude Northern Ireland from the Abortion Act.