According to the Office of National Statistics MPs on £65,738 are paid more than 95% of the people they represent. Yet according to a survey carried out by YouGov for IPSA, they want more, an average of a 32% hike. These are MPs from parties with a policy of keeping other public sector worker’s pay frozen. Andrew Bridgen had the balls to tell the BBC the truth:

Pollsters YouGov were asked to survey MPs by IPSA to find out if they thought £65,738 was enough for their salary.

MPs were asked to anonymously suggest an appropriate salary:

On average Tories wanted £96,740, Lib Dems £78,361 and Labour MPs a mere £77,322. Labour’s policy is to freeze public sector pay for nurses, teachers, policemen and soldiers. The UK average income is £26,500. We’re all in this together, right?

Last year Guido spent many months hamming-up the scandal around the subsidies from the taxpayer for food and drink in Parliament, and the special prices only available to MPs. Back in August 2012 the subsidy was slashed by a huge £600,000, leaving the poor piggies only receiving £5.2 million from our pockets to help them with their bar bills.

It’s good to see that people are still sizzling about this issue, the breakfast menu above has been doing the rounds today. Bacon and egg on toast for £1.05? It would be a bargain wherever you found it, but in the exclusive, rent-free, palatial riverside dining facilities of the Houses of Parliament? Un-egg-cceptable.

How many arguments can Labour find themselves on the wrong side of in one day? It looks like they are gearing up to oppose the planned scrapping of the £7m spent on councillor pensions. Hilary Benn is citing European Law in an attempt to delay this blindingly obvious cut. Another one for them to explain on the doorstep: Why does the vested interest of Labour’s councillors lining their pockets come before frontline council services?

Another year, another crowd of venal, lying, cheating ‘honourable’ members bringing shame upon the Mother of Parliaments. There was much cause for celebration in November as the Standards and Privileges committee finally found that the disgraced invoice falsifier Denis MacShane was guilty of swindling tens of thousands of pounds worth taxpayers’ money. They described it as “the gravest case which has come to us for adjudication”, and MacShane’s career was over before this crooked, corrupt, gutter politician could say slush fund. Guido hazily remembers cracking open the seventh bottle of Chateau MacShane that fateful autumn afternoon. It’s now in the hands of the CPS...

Back in January Guido kicked off the year by launching a campaign against the MPs food and drink subsidy. This blog revealed that the taxpayer was subsidising their rib-eye steak and chips to the tune of £5.93 a pop, forking out £3.15 for each seared pigeon breast and chipping in £5.27 for each glazed belly of pork chowed down by our honourable members. John Bercow said there was nothing to see here. The old media didn’t agree…

As the year drew to a close another expenses scandal threatened to cost the jobs of several MPs at the next election. Guido caught a few rent-swappers of his own, it will be interesting to see how Stephen Dorrell, Linda Riordan, Meg Munn, Andy Burnham, Chris Bryant, Helen Grant, Bill Cash, John Whittingdale, Peter Luff, Jessica Lee, David Amess, Kevin Barron and Don Foster fare in 2015.

A review of this year’s expenses cheats would not be complete without a special mention for piggy-in-chief Margaret Moran. She received a two-year treatment order after she was found by a court to have committed 15 counts of false accounting.

And, lest we forget a politician who takes our money and laughs in our faces, wish a happy anniversary to Gordon Brown…

It’s well over a year now since Gordon Brown has spoken in Parliament but he has manged to put in two written questions on behalf of his constituents. The enquiries to the MOD are on the identical topic to his last batch of questions – ten months ago.

Written Answers – Defence: Dalgety Bay (17 Dec 2012)
Gordon Brown: To ask the Secretary of State for Defence what recent
assessment he has made of reports on the incidence of cancer in the
Dalgety Bay area.

So Brown’s total of contribution this year has extended to nine written questions, which on his MPs salary puts that at about £7,300 a pop. And that’s before you factor in the expenses he still has the cheek to claim…

£53,000 expenses cheat Margaret Moran’s lawyer has delivered a withering rant about how terribly out of order the press are for reporting her crimes:

“The more vengeful press, who hound her at her front door, seem to think that the only way someone can be demonstrably mentally ill is if they are in a straitjacket in a padded cell. The reports back in April all agree that she suffers from this mental illness. Hounding a mentally ill woman is a dangerous and vile thing to do, at any time, particularly post the Leveson conclusions. It could have led to an increased risk of suicide. There will always be sections of the media who believe it’s a huge con. But they’ve not read all the evidence.”

At least Craig Oliver did it subtly…

Via @SophyRidgeSky

Expenses cheat Margaret Moran was “too depressed” to attend court to hear her sentence this morning, but she faces a two-year supervision and treatment order as ‘punishment’ for her £53,000 swindle. This expenses piggie was found to have committed 15 counts of false accounting. The judge says some will say “she got away with it”. Moran isn’t the first expenses cheat to dodge jail, and she won’t be the last…

Maria Miller has been well and truly skewered by the Standard this afternoon during an interview in which she tried to play down allegations about her expenses. Did Sir Thomas Legg, the man who carried out the first independent audit into her second home claims, know that her parents lived in the property? “I obviously spoke to the Fees Office about my claims and they were happy that everything was in order”. Hardly a yes.

Who was the second independent auditor? Joe Murphy reports that “The Culture Secretary replied that it was the Conservative Party which “audited all Conservative MPs’ expenses”.  Her definition of independent may raise some eyebrows as the Tory panel was headed by the then Chief Whip and David Cameron’s chief of staff”. Most suspect of all was Miller’s answer to the charge that her decision to stop claiming just as the expenses scandal broke was more than coincidence:

“”I think there was a lot of concern about the rules and, er, a lot of concern about, you know, the whole issue, and it’s something I felt that I didn’t want to be, sort of, mixed up in, the fact that I …”  Mrs Miller finally stopped trying to explain herself, and simply said:  “I just made that decision.””

She will have to do better than that when John Lyon comes calling…

Labour rent-a-quote John Mann has this afternoon registered a complaint with John Lyon, the Parliamentary Standards Commissioner, over reports that Maria Miller breached expenses rules by claiming £90,000 for a second home lived in by her parents.

“Maria Millar’s (sic) circumstances are identical to those of Tony McNulty who allowed his parents to live in his second home rent free and the Committee on Standards and Privileges ruled that he had broken the rules.”

People close to Miller point out that her arrangements have been cleared twice as being wholly proper, as well as pointing out that it’s not her parents home, stressing that it’s her own property that her parents live in, with her, and have done for 20 years. Could it be a strange case of breaking the letter of the law but not the spirit? Mysterious…

A busy day for Maria Miller today, and not least because this morning’s Telegraph reports that the Culture Secretary has claimed £90,000 in expenses for the mortgage payments and other costs of a second home lived in by her parents. IPSA rules require second homes to be used exclusively by MPs.

Claiming for a property lived in by an MP’s parents is “specifically prohibited”. 

Guido can reveal that Miller has two properties in her name: a cottage in her Basingstoke constituency, and the property pictured above in Wimbledon.

The Wimbledon property was purchased by Miller and her husband in 1996 for £234,000, and will be worth at least three times that now. Although expenses rules clearly state that second homes must be lived in exclusively by MPs, Miller’s parents lived in the property while she spent most of her time in Basingstoke main home between 2005 and 2011. She stopped claiming in 2009, days before the expenses scandal broke.

The Telegraph story coming out on this day of all days is surely nothing more than coincidence…