Last week’s own goal in which a council leader remarked that the Conservative shadow cabinet “haven’t run a piss-up in a brewery” has renewed the promotion hopes of one Tory backbencher. Positions within licensed industry bodies have raised the prospect of a return to the front bench for former shadow Welsh secretary Nigel Evans.

Speaking exclusively to Political Scrapbook the MP for Ribble Valley said:

“With my varied roles as vice-chair of the All-Party Beer Group and president of pub safety group National Pubwatch, I have most certainly run a piss-up in a brewery.” – Nigel Evans

Friends of Evans claimed last night that several hospitality events the MP had helped to organise took place on brewery premises. A source within CCHQ has confirmed that Team Cameron are looking at ways his experience could be utilised in government, with the possibility that Evans could fill a new role as “Piss-Up Czar”.

Trebles all round!

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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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