The Taxpayers’ Alliance has calculated that the three Labour MPs charged with theft from the taxpayers; Jim Devine, David Chaytor and Elliot Morley, will share between them a pay-off totalling £151,552 come election day.  They will also get generous gold-plated pensions. This is an outrageous piss-take.

Given that they are unlikely to have their day in Court before election day, the House of Commons should pass a resolution that any member facing criminal charges for financial impropriety should have payment of resettlement grants and pensions suspended until the result of the charges are known.  If found guilty they should lose all their pension rights.  They will still be drawing their parliamentary pay every month in any event.

This is what would happen to a servicemen or police officer who was found guilty of gross misconduct.  It would be bordering on obscene to expect the victims of the crime – taxpayers – to pay hundreds of thousands to those convicted of thieving from them.  Guido completely accepts the principle that these three are presumed innocent until proven guilty, but can see no legal reason why the payments can not be suspended until the Courts have resolved the issue.

Is there not one good MP who will put a motion to this effect before the House?

So Legg has found 52% of MPs guilty of over-claiming from taxpayers, all three party leaders had to make repayments and some MPs should face criminal charges today.  They all face an election.

So judgement is coming in one form or another.  The British political class make excuses, they wriggle and they deny.  The inescapable truth is that they have been caught looting taxpayers for all they could get away with, they deserve all the opprobrium and more.  Imagine a private sector firm where 52% of the staff had been found guilty of cheating their customers.  It would be treated as a criminal enterprise.

So how should we describe our political class?  It is not right and it certainly isn’t honourable.

*Legg’s vetting of 752 MPs’ and ex-MPs’ expenses over the period 2004-09 resulted in a total figure of 390 being told to pay up. That is 52% of the MPs…

Hungry MP Rosie Cooper clearly wasn’t listening to the discussion going on at the Slimming World dinner for a hundred that she hosted in December 2007.  If she had she might have avoided putting that “mouth-watering array of sweets, crisps, cakes, ice creams and doughnuts” on her expenses. She really put her snout in the trough…

Guido is having a great time trawling the function room bookings. It is a gold mine of sleazy connections and favours.

Keep track of developments here.

£1.3 million in fiddles repaid. Average fiddle was for £4,000.

Link to report [PDF] here.

Post info in the comments…

UPDATE : John Redwood MP had to repay £112 for the cost of re-seeding his lawn, uncharacteristically he wanted us to pay for the green shoots of recovery.

Bob Ainsworth to payback  £1,526.50 for antique dresser and brand new gate-gate.

Dr Julian Lewis MP double claimed £829.85 for mortgage interest and over-claimed for a £789 for a washer/drier.

Balls for overpaid mortgage repayments £1,363.44.

Phil Hope to pay back a whopping £42,674.13.

Rt Hon David Heathcoat-Amory MP overshot the gardening allowance by £26,696.58.

Douglas “Moat Cleaning” Hogg paying back £20,639. Elliot Morley ‘has no issues’. We know he is guilty.

Bercow has repaid £978.51 for mortgage overpayments.

Margaret Beckett still owes for illegitimate claims for gardening. She has still not repaid the £2,539.75 Legg asked for.

Keith Vaz, £414 for a foot-stool.

Iris Robinson £1,614 for a bed. No further comment.

John Baron MP cashed in by re-mortgaging his house to the tune of £8,821.10. Re-mortgaging is specifically against the Green Book rules.

Gordon has repaid £13,723.04 for his cleaning claims despite being asked for “only” £12,888.03. A shame he wasn’t so diligent with our deficit.

Ed Vaizey paying back £2,449.45 for amongst other things, a dining table. How did he break the old one?

Jeremy Richard Browne appealed a demand to repay £17,894.24 for re-mortgaging his home, which is specifically disallowed in the Green Book rules. He has successfully appealed this down to £0.

CCHQ: Total cabinet repayments since 1 April 2009 = £35,036. Brown’s £13,723 represents 40% of total

George Galloway to pay back £3,187.28 of mobile phone bills. Calling the Middle East is expensive!

Julie Kirkbride had to repay £29,243 scammed. Oink.

Yvette Cooper was overpaid by £1,363.21 in mortgage interest for the home she shares with Blinky.

Nick Clegg has had to repay £910.00 for gardening costs.

Jonathan Djanogly was ordered to repay £17,364.76 for gardening and cleaning costs. The limit was £1000.

Parmjit Dhanda had to repay £2,208.28 for overpayments of mortgage interest.

Quentin “Belltower” Davies claims were at least so outrageous that most of them didn’t even get past the placid Fees Office. He did, however, manage to over-claim for cleaning to the tune of £658.00.

Wayne David was ordered to repay £12,959.69 for a combination of insurance and mortgage fiddles (switching to a higher rate on the taxpayer’s dime) as well as £430 for a bedroom chair.

Alistair Darling claimed more than double the recommended amount for a chest of drawers and has been ordered to repay £554.00.

Anthony Steen claimed for “a flagpole rope and binding” for his very nice house.

CCHQ: Ed Balls paid Brown’s former press officer – Fiona Gordon – £4,000 in exes in 08/09

Vaizey appealed to Legg over £30.

Michael Spicer failed in his appeal to avoid paying back £15,109.37 for gardening, cleaning and a dishwasher. £10k of this is therefore still owed.

Sir Thomas Legg will report on Tuesday the long awaited results of his audit of MPs expenses. Right about now Members are opening letters revealing whether their appeals against Legg’s stringent payback requests have failed or not. Someone who has read the report told the Standard that it is a “brutal … unexploded bomb”.  Not only will over three hundred of the troughing piggies be slammed on Tuesday, but Legg also goes after the officials who allowed the pocket lining to continue without raising eyebrows. Great news.

The decision to bring in Legg was a rushed one taken by Downing Street at the height of the expenses scandal and it has come back to bite Gordon. Not only was he himself ordered to pay back over twelve grand but his measure designed to restore faith in Parliament has come full circle and in the end will reopen the expenses scandal, reignite all that hate and anger, with less than one hundred days until the election.

Another great tactical move from the bunker.

Austin Mitchell has an EDM up supporting Scams Awareness Month,

“this House welcomes the Office of Fair Trading’s Scams Awareness month blah blah blah”

By coincidence this week Austin Mitchell was ordered to repay £10,000 he over-claimed on his mortgage.

At 4 p.m. today MPs find out if Legg has rejected their appeals to be allowed to get away with such scams…

David Chaytor, the soon to be former MP for Bury North, drew up a tenancy agreement with his daughter but disguised their relationship by giving her middle name as her surname.  That is deception.  That cannot be spun as an over-sight in the way he is trying to make out that continuing to claim for a phantom mortgage was an over-sight.  Chaytor claims his mother  was sick, he was so busy he didn’t notice the mortgage was paid off, the dog ate his conscience etc.

The Sunday Times reveals that Chaytor

“claimed that he was renting his flat from a woman he called Sarah Rastrick. These are the first names of his daughter Sarah Rastrick Chaytor, who had recently graduated from university when the arrangement started.”

We already knew that Chaytor had also used the name Sarah Rastrick when paying his daughter £5,000 from his Commons office allowances for research while she was a student.  Using his daughter’s name to commit fraud is particularly low.  Guido thinks there is a good chance that Chaytor will go to jail.  Rightly so…

The semi-official LibDem policy of exploiting the expenses system for political rather than personal gain is looking likely to become a campaign issue.  This is in some ways a more insidious form of sleaze.  There is circumstantial evidence that Hampshire’s LibDem MPs; Sandra Gidley, Mike Hancock, Christopher Huhne and the retiring Mark Oaten have manipulated the Communications Allowance to save their party spending some £17,000 on envelope stuffing machines, which they claim are not used for political communications.

LibDem MPs like Sarah Teather have subsidised their constituency offices out of public funds for partisan purposes.  She like many LibDems candidates uses an unincorporated association (controlled by LibDem activists) which publishes no accounts to produce her party literature.  The not unfounded suspicion is that this is effectively a slush fund used to gouge the taxpayer at inflated costs for ‘official’ literature which subsidises the printing of unofficial party leaflets. These are not isolated cases, Cowley Street advises MPs to be “imaginative” in exploiting “grey areas”.  They are still ripping off the taxpayer just as much as David Chaytor.

Sion Simon MP  has blown tomorrow’s Telegraph splash about the fact he paid his sister £40,000 rent out of his parliamentary allowances. Simon has announced he will be paying back twenty thousands pounds of this rent that he claimed after the rule banning renting from family came into force.  He gave the exclusive to his local paper in a severely unsubtle damage limitation move.  Thomas Legg has ruled that all family deals since 2004 are tainted, hence why Bernard Jenkin got a £63,000 bill so it isn’t exactly clear why Simon isn’t paying back the full amount.

This is a move straight out of the political scoundrels and troughers play-book, along with reporting yourself (after you have been caught a la Hain, Harman et al).  It doesn’t really wash, he broke the rules he should pay back the whole £45,000.  incidentally, he was shacked up with Nicola Burdett, Gordon Brown’s SpAd who was in charge of keeping him out of embarrassing situations.  An impossible task…

See also Meet the Man in Charge of Digital Britain, Simon Spoofs Webcameron, and the classic tears of laughter rolling down your face New Statesman article.

There has been a lot of tut-tutting about Gordon belatedly paying back £500 for the “questionable” painting of a summerhouse in the garden of his Fife home. So there should be, how did Gordon imagine it was that the summerhouse expenses claimed had been incurred “wholly, necessarily, and exclusively” in the performance of parliamentary duties?

He was able to do that using his second home allowance, but hang on a second, where is his first home?  He lives in grace and favour accomodation in Downing Street, he has use of the grace and favour Chequer’s mansion.  He pays nothing in rent or mortgage for those properties.  When he married he adroitly gave to Sarah the flat he bought cheaply in dubious circumstances from Robert Maxwell’s estate and Guido understands it is now rented out at a profit.  That leaves only his old Fife home.  It is clearly his real home, it is the only one he owns. Yet he designates it as his “second home” for expenses purposes.

That is just quite simply a dishonest and false claim made only to maximise the amount he can milk from the expenses system.  It allows him to live without paying for accommodation anywhere – if only he was so frugal with government expenditure – all at the expense of the taxpayer.  He taxes the shirts off our backs to pay for the ironing of the shirt on his back.