Seems that the Mayor of London has a talent for picking the “wonderful”, “brilliant” and scandal-prone when it comes to expenses.
The BBC reports that Boris Johnson claimed on his MP expenses for a website which promoted his mayoral campaign and the sale of his books:
Mr Johnson claimed the £500 from his MP’s communications allowance for redesigning his website homepage in December 2007.
In a letter obtained by BBC London under the Freedom of Information Act, a parliamentary official told Mr Johnson that his claim was rejected because his website fell “significantly outside” the allowance guidelines.
The House of Commons guidance on the Communications Allowance couldn’t be any clearer –specifically:
6.12.4
You must not use your CA funded publications or websites:• to conduct business activities or to obtain inappropriate
private benefit• to promote or campaign on behalf of any person
seeking election
All the same, Boris maintains in an interview with the BBC (video here) that his staff members who submitted the claim were “wonderful” and “brilliant”:
“I don’t really think that I’m disposed to go back to those people, who are no longer working for me, and find out exactly what their thinking was.”
It’s a good thing, then, that the police are disposed to do just that with Ian Clement.
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2 Comments
I’m struggling to understand your point here, Boris Johnson’s staff put in a claim for something he wasn’t entitled to claim, and it got rejected. So in other words, Boris’s staff, not the man himself, failed to do something wrong.
Even if you want to stretch criticism to lay the blame fully on Boris for not ensuring his staff were competent in claiming only legitimate expenses, the fact the remains that the claim was rejected.
If you’re going to criticise someone at least criticise them for something they actual succeeded in doing wrong, otherwise you only exacerbate the public perception that politics is just a bunch of self-interested morons who haven’t progressed from playground level accusations.
Can you tell us if Lord Rennard has repaid the taxpayer the £ 41,000 he claimed for his second home?
This is a lot more money than the sums you are banging on about in your article or are you hoping that the electorate have forgotten about this?
Or is simply one rule for the Lib Dems and another for the rest?
People in glass houses…..