‘I was only doing what the Fees Office told me guv’

‘If at first you don’t succeed, give up’, might have been good advice to an MP who lamely claimed that his or her purchase of some idiotic luxury was within the rules, but now the, ‘try, try again’ bit has kicked in. The latest fashionable defence is that everything was approved by the Fees Office, whether for living quarters for the gardener or childminder relative. It also turns out that the failure to declare financial assistance from the taxpayer for filling in your tax form, as part of your earned income, was all the fault of the Green Book itself, which did not take into account the Inland Revenue’s rules.

Three things strike me about this. Firstly, how can we expect any of these characters to run the country when they or their advisers don’t have the ability to apply rules which already apply to all of us? Secondly, how do they find the time to do all this shopping and property dealing? Probably because they are making a pigs ear of running the country. Thirdly, if I had been advised by an accountant that various dealings were all within the law and it then turns out that I have lost my reputation and job and that I now risk a prosecution with penalty payments for arrears, I would sue the accountant.

So all these aggrieved MPs who have apparently been landed in it by the Fees Office should sue the fees office. They might say that they were only doing what they had been told to do by their employers. You would then have to join them as co-defendants. All you would need to do would be to get the names and addresses of all your other colleagues in the House of Commons and issue proceedings against all of them in person (yourself included) or at their principal residence. Are, I thought there would be a snag....