Guido has been hunting MacShane for years. Well today the disgraced former Labour MP finally had the decency to plead guilty to false accounting, admitting £12,900 worth of fraudulent expenses. MacShame signed his own death warrant in May 2010, when he brazenly wrote a piece for the Standard giving his top ten tips for new ministers on how to milk the benefits of high office.
In October 2010, Guido broke the news that MacShane had been kicked out of the Labour Party over suspected fraud. He had claimed £125,000 in constituency office costs for his own garage. The cops investigated and his file was handed to the CPS, with MacShane overheard crying: “Joan is leaving me and I’m going to jail”. He thought he had got away with it when the police investigation into him was dropped in 2012. His staff gave him a cake to welcome him back to the fold that included jail breaking files. He may have got lucky striking up an unlikely romance with Vicky Pryce, but that luck was about to run out.
MacShame’s reprieve only lasted a few months. In November 2012 he was suspended from the Commons by the Standards and Privileges Committee, whose damning report concluded that his was “the gravest case which has come to us for adjudication”. Labour said his career was over. A new complaint was made to the police by a Paul Staines of the Sunlight Centre for Open Politics, the cops reopened their investigation, his file was one again handed to the CPS and this time MacShane was charged. Justice may have been delayed, but today MacShane pleaded guilty. Gotcha!
