Denis MacShane has had his police investigation dropped. It was triggered in October 2010 after the Parliamentary authorities suspected him of fraud due to the £125,000 in rent that he claimed for a constituency office that turned out to be the grotty garage at the end of his garden. He also put in a plethora of invoices for translation services, paid in cash. To his brother Edmund Matyjaszek. 

Guido suspected this announcement would be coming after he was tipped that the specialist crime cops that investigated MPs expenses had all been transferred to Operation Weeting and the associated investigations. MacShane will not get the opportunity to ever clear his name in court, instead the enduring image that remains in the public mind will be this:

No further questions Your Honour…

You could already be gossiping about Vicky Pryce and Denis MacShane if you had got your Daily Star Sunday yesterday…

You would already know where the latest slap for Lansley’s plain packaging has come from and which hot blonde Tory MP is making wives nervous. And much more too…

Guido’s Sunday column is now online here… 

When he’s not fibbing on Twitter, Denis MacShane is sounding off in the House. Take yesterday’s gem of an intervention during DCLG Questions:

“Frankly it’s not good enough because the department is not publishing spending between 50p and £500 and that is where on credit cards and other areas a lot of things go wrong, so can we actually have some transparency in this wretched department instead of the cover-up they are currently practising?”

Not only did MacShane’s facts “go wrong” – credit card spending under £500 is published, but this is from a man under police investigation for his dubious use of public money and the subsequent “cover-up”. Scotland Yard are still looking into those “wretched”  invoices, laptops and that garage. Labour have withdrawn the whip from MacShane, yet he still insists on hanging around on their benches like a bad smell.

Time for someone to have a quiet word…

Q: How do you know when Denis MacShane is lying?

A: When he’s tweeting.

Yesterday Guido brought  you the disgraced, de-whipped Labour MP’s fibs about the Olympics and the pound. Now this morning a psephological co-conspirator gets in touch to point out another howler:

Polls said support for EU was plummeting in Croatia but 67% vote to join. Old tale – voters tell truth to pollsters but lie when they vote—
Denis MacShane (@DenisMacShane) January 22, 2012

Except, the polls in Croatia, see here, were correctly predicting that Yes would win, and were showing support for the EU growing. A MacShameless porkie…

No this isn’t about his fraudulent expense claims, this is about the whoppers MacShane tells on Twitter:

Without even checking the records, Guido recalls that the Los Angeles Olympics in 1984 were officially opened by President Ronald Reagan and saw him re-elected in November 1984. More recently the Canadian Conservative government of Steven Harper won a full majority of votes in 2011, after the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics, following successive minority and coalition governments in the previous years.

Last week MacShane made the bizarre claim that €uro had got stronger against the “Osborne pound” which was “still weakest currency in world as oil prices rise”. The pound is in fact up 5% against the crisis-ridden €uro over the last three months.

UPDATE: Courtesy of William Pitt in the comments below:

1984 – Los Angeles (Reagan reelected in 1984)
1988 – Seoul (Roh Tae-woo returned in 1992)
1992 – Barcelona (Marquez returned as PM 1993)
1996 – Atlanta (Clinton reelected 1996)
2000 – Sydney (Howard reelected 2001)
2004 – Athens (Karamanlis reelected 2007)
2008 – China (no brainer)

If only we had listened to Denis MacShane just two years ago, we wouldn’t be in the horrendous mess we are now:

“For more than a decade we have been told that the euro was a terrible idea, while the good old pound sterling would protect the British economy from the wily ways of the Europeans. Now more and more people are asking why the pound is letting us down – and whether treating it as a shibboleth that cannot be questioned makes sense any more. All the old arguments against the euro have fallen away. There is no European super-state emerging with its adoption. There is no dictation of economic policy from Brussels.

If the euro were used here as it is without fuss in countries we are close to, including Ireland and the Netherlands, then the next Governor of the European Central Bank could easily be a Brit. But if British voters are no longer going to feel like poor relations whenever they holiday in other European countries, then before long someone is going to have to begin making the case that like shillings and pence, the pound may now have had its day.”

As we know he is an expert with funny money…

Given that he’s still suspended from the parliamentary Labour Party, and sits as an independent MP while the police continue to investigate his expenses, you would have thought that Denis MacShane would be keeping a low profile in Liverpool. But no, not only is he pea-cocking around the conference centre pressing the flesh, he has even had the cheek to appear on the Daily Politics.

Shameless…

Four years before the likely General Election the Tories have decided to very publicly select a candidate in Rotherham. Officially the Party’s “Parliamentary Spokesman” for Denis MacShane’s seat, Jackie Whiteley fought it at the last election, increasing the Conservative vote to 16.7% pushing the LibDems into take second place.

It’s almost as if they are planning for a by-election…

Guido noted last week that Denis MacShane was still sitting in the core rump of Labour MPs, despite having the whip removed. It seems someone has had a quiet word with him though, as today he is sat far away from his party and plonked himself with the nationalists and other opposition types. And rightly so…

Tomorrow disgraced Rotherham MP Denis MacShane is hosting a conference about how the Labour Party can get out of opposition. Ticket sales are obviously very low as a last minute desperate PR job is currently going on and the requirement to pay in advance has been lifted. MacShane is using his constituency office to organise the event and all profits are being donated to the Rotherham Labour Party. Yet MacShane has been given the boot as a Labour MP.

His taxpayer funded office being used for blatant party political uses:

Why are the likes of Polly Toynbee, David Walker, Jessica Asato, Tristum Hunt and a host of other Labour figures willing to turn a blind eye to the fact MacShane is currently under police investigation for corruption and help raise funds for him? If they are wondering why Labour were booted out of office, perhaps some soul-searching would be a good place to start.