Exes mark the spot on my contract with the Tories
See also:
- It's a good job he doesn't run the Britty Shiles
- Money, money, money...in a People Officer's world
- Letter: New rulers, same planet
- Allowances frozen for councillors
- Taxpayer-funded designer handbags at dawn
SO WHAT happened to the new political leaf? Now they've turned it over we find it's nothing more than the flimsiest fig variety which goes nowhere near covering their customary naked greed.
Coincidentally, while writing that last sentence, my eye lit upon a document on my desk. 'A contract between the Conservative Party and Maurice C O'Brien'.
I kept it for a laugh but notice now how it speaks of years of broken promises, the expenses scandal, MPs' remoteness from the people, mending a broken society, reforming our rotten political system and promises real change.
It bears Leader Dave's signature, and says I'm to use it to hold the Tories to account. If they don't deliver I can vote them out "in five years' time", he says. Of course there'll be no chance of doing it any earlier, thanks to their squalid little coalition flanker on fixed term parliaments.
They say you need brass neck to be a politician and the sight of Hazel Blears strutting back into the Commons is proof of that, not to mention those shysters sloping off to the Lords.
But as soon as the latest reptile intake slithered into the Commons the whinging began over the new expenses regime. In proper jobs where all expenses must be accounted for, you pay for your own accommodation, and anyone on the take gets sacked or sent to prison; and it's called stealing. David Laws deserves not a jot of sympathy. Using a personal relationship as an excuse for fiddling is nothing more than a smokescreen. If this extremely wealthy fellow hadn't claimed rentit wouldn't have been an issue either way, would it? His replacement's a flipper too, by the way.
It's all well and good Mr 'Contract' Cameron telling us Laws is an honourable man for resigning and referring himself to the standards commission. But he only did so after he'd been rumbled and, dishonourably, never owned up when the rest of the great unwashed were being turned over last year.
Worst of all though, Laws and his Lib Dem chums are seemingly the architects of the capital gains onslaught threatening to complete the devastation of honest, hard-working folk begun by the Brownite looting of the nation's pension schemes.
Meanwhile Dave's own new brooms are already sweeping aside one ofhis promises by using chauffeur-driven limos like kids let loose in a chocolate factory.
And there was environment secretary Caroline Spelman (environment mark you), who had to repay ten grand last year for hiring a nanny at our expense, pictured using a limo to take her to play tennis with Andrew MacKay, disgraced house flipper and unfrocked Bracknell MP. Now doesn't that just about sum up the whole damned mess?
Return to the main index, get more from this section or browse our Opinion archives.


















