SUNDAY, MAY 24, 2009
Sunday Sleaze Round-Up
Post links to sleaze stories in the comments and Guido will summarise them here. It is a dirty job, but someone has to do it…
Andy Burnham was assisted by the Common’s authorities who bent the rules after he got a bung from a property developer and managed to over-claim in the same year by £10,000. More support for Guido’s thesis that the Palace of Westminster is less about public service and more like gangster racketeering.
Eric Joyce has claimed over a million, paying zero capital gains tax on his property flipping over the years. He told the Mail on Sunday that this ‘This conversation may have cost me £160,000′, it will hopefully cost him his seat as well. Though he will have sworn year after year on his tax return that he was making a full and true statement. A criminal offence.
LibDem MP Malcolm Bruce managed to claim for two different properties simultaneously. Cleverly he put his wife on the payroll at his constituency home and used the incidental expenses provision to feather bed that home and the ACA to featherbed his London home. Guido thought he new every trick in the book by now, this is a new one. Bruce won’t tell us how much he paid his wife. Our money into his household income and he wants it to be kept secret?
Angela Browning, a former Tory minister, claimed £10,000 for her website, which looks like it took three hours to throw together. She claimed for the usual long list of interior design features including the kitchen sink (£2,714). Worse than Jacqui Smith…
Derek Conway tried to claim for a £160 pig-skin wallet. How appropriate.
The news isn’t all bad, according to the Sunday Times half the occupants of the parliament of whores could be swept away on the tide of righteous anger sweeping the nation. Guido is betting on 50 resigning or standing down in disgrace and perhaps a 100 more incumbents suffering the wrath of the fleeced voting taxpayers - over and above party swings. The Sunday Times reckons 325 troughers will be forced onto their index-linked gold-plated pensions. Guido’s heart bleeds…
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