“You get what pay for”, said Tory Ian Liddell-Grainger when defending the largest MP expense claims in the South West. “The majority of the money has been spent on staff costs. I employ slightly more people than most but they are a really good team.” So who are is superhuman troupe toiling day and night for the citizens of Bridgewater and West Somerset?

For the taxpayer, “getting what you pay for” means keeping ILG’s wife Jill and two twenty-something children Peter and Sophie on the Parliamentary payroll. The Somerset MP has topped Guido Fawkes’ nepotism survey, employing more members of staff sharing the same surname than any other MP.  Until his youngest daughter was no longer eligible, Liddel-Grainger’s claims for family travel were valued in the top 3% of all 640+ members.

While CCHQ attempted to keep the “deranged” MP under wraps during the election campaign, he still managed to infuriate voters by refusing to take part in debates with other candidates,  telling the BBC he ”did not have the time” to attend hustings.

Perhaps he was busy updating his “excellent pussy” blog?

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Chris Paul of Labour of Love fame is nothing if not tenacious. In fact, if George Galloway met him he would probably salute his indefatigability.

Just as the Liberal Democrats appeared to “get off lightly” during the 2005 election campaign, so they have emerged from the expenses scandal relatively unscathed. Labour of Love has had knives out for “shameless fiddler” Paul Rowen MP (pictured above) and others for some time.

In response to a comment by the Norfolk Blogger, Mr. Paul has today posted a six-point distillation of Liberal Democrat shenanigans, which at best are untransparent and at worse looks suspiciously like laundering taxpayer money through to fund political activity. You can read the full thing here.

1. Arguably contrived office tenancies, with often unregulated office and equipment shares, and in Rowen’s case an independent valuation apparently coming from a Board Member of his Lib Dem supporting/owned ultimate landlord;
2. Generally speaking undeclared tithes on elected councillors and MPs which are neither registered as donations nor trigger party accounts though clearly eligible for both types of transparency;
3. Advertising surgeries and the like on political leaflets, at silly prices, which is poor value for money and which looks like tax money paying for party politics;
4. All sorts of gimmicks around printing. Ridiculous apportionment of costs. And “Printing Societies” which are unincorporated and unaudited “black box” schemes appear to be endemic;
5. A prevalence of street fighting agent types not caseworkers, apparently paid for by tax pounds but appearing to do party politics not casework.
6. Mysterious standard payments to Party Offices for who knows what. From Tax pounds not from tithe on earnings.

It is rumoured the big-boy press may finally pick this up and run with it.

Just when they thought it was safe to return to parliament.

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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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