Hungry? Fancy a rib-eye steak and hand-cut chips with béarnaise sauce served in the agreeable setting of a restaurant in an historic building on the riverside. Waited on by liveried waiters bringing silver service to white linen tables? It will cost our MPs a mere £7.80 and you’ll chip in £5.93 in subsidy for that lunch. We are all in it together.

If you are a vegetarian or dieting for the New Year perhaps you would like an artichoke and tomato salad drizzled with truffle dressing? Only £2.05 in the MPs’ dining room thanks to the £1.56 that minimum wage taxpayers have contributed to the MPs lunch in subsidy. The 646 MPs have their lunches subsidised to the tune of £8,823 each per annum.  Three years after the expenses scandal, MPs are still troughing at our expense…