The seventy-year-old Tory peer racked up £14,000 of fake accommodation charges between March 2006 and May 2009. He wasn’t staying in town, but being chauffeured back to Essex instead. His claims that “they were all at it”, however true, did little to help his case. The prosecution closing statement was damning:

“There was no real honesty in making claims that way, because of four reasons – the written rules, the golden rule of ‘don’t make a claim for more than you spend’, there’s nothing to suggest this was the practice, and his behaviour. The way he filled out the forms does not suggest he really believed the rules allowed him to make false claims. It was a deliberate and dishonest decision on his part to fill in the forms in that way.”

He will be sentenced in three weeks time…