Oct/09
16:37 1
Bolly, darling? Harvey Nichols and Alan Duncan break the ‘no champagne’ rule
Unbelievably, as Scrapbook blogged yesterday, the Tories have a temporary shopping mall with its own Harvey Nichols at their Manchester conference. They must have missed that email about ‘no champagne’:
Having been demoted to prisons spokesman, it seems Alan Duncan has no incentive to toe the line either. Good to see the honourable member for Rutland and Melton isn’t “living on rations” with this lovely Deutz Brut 2004:
Two hat tips: Benedict Brogan and a conference spy.
Sep/09
09:13 2
Alan Duncan: once, twice, three times an “idiot”
It’s been coming for a while now. Alan “MPs are forced to live on rations” Duncan has finally been demoted by David Cameron over a month before parliament returns and far enough in advance of conference season that by then no one will care.
But it’s great to see Sky News’ Jon Craig getting into the swing of this blogging lark with the kind of five letter words many ‘proper journalists’ would be loathe to commit to the internets:
Next stop: Jon Craig sweary guest posts on Old Holborn?
Aug/09
16:48 1
Nigel Evans stars in “hide behind the frontbencher”
Tory minnow Nigel Evans MP has been happy to hide in the shadow of frontbencher Alan Duncan in the wake of their unguarded comments on expenses.
What an opportune moment to revisit Evans’ pious remarks on the expenses scandal, which were posted on his parliamentary website:
Even though I was the 570th lowest spending MP out of 646 I am hardly complacent concerning the rot at the heart of our system … These rules now need to be torn up and replaced with something which is not tainted with the murky smog of snouts in troughs.
Snouts in the trough, eh? Scrapbook wonders what those Ribble Valley constituents living on minimum wage make of the following statement, which was secretly recorded in the Houses of Parliament:
“Got to have a second income, mate, couldn’t survive on £64,000″
As he is teased about “trading down” in his choice of drink, Mr Evans adds:
“This is what it has come to now – actually, I’m paying, that’s what it has come to.”
Evans told the Lancashire Telegraph he was being “ironic”. Talking of irony, Evans concluded the article on his website with the following:
I do hope that this same transparency which has acted as a catalyst for urgent change of MPs allowances will be introduced into every corner of public life.
One assumes being filmed secretly by Heydon Prowse wasn’t the sort of transparency Evans had in mind!
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