£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…

Believe it or not, David Willetts gave an interview that caught Guido’s eye in the Times this weekend. Speaking about what the government was doing to boost Britain’s scientific standing in the world, Two Brains let the cat out of the bag regarding a certain conflicted MP:

“A new scientific field known as “synthetic biology”, which finds ways of using specifically-designed bacteria to solve medical and industrial problems, will be handed £50 million of the new money. Mr Willetts said that he had been particularly taken by one company, TMO Renewables, that had designed a micro-organism capable of turning human waste into biofuels.”

Tim Yeo, the man in charge of the Energy and Climate Change select committee, is paid £5,400 per month as chairman of TMO. His company lobbies the government for funding and Willetts signs off a tranche of taxpayers’ cash for them to turn poo into fuel. Whiffy…

Helen Grant may have sacked her part time researcher/husband in the wake of a turning over by Dispatches for her expenses and property rent-swapping, but the Equalities Minister is not out of trouble yet. Thurrock MP Jackie Doyle Price has humiliated her fellow 2010 Tory by refusing to share a platform with her at an event in constituency. Grant was visiting the town hall and Doyle put the boot in:

“I only heard she was coming on the grapevine, but chose not to go as I disapprove of Helen Grant’s expense claims and I don’t really wish to be associated with that kind of behaviour.”

Nice to see principles before party politics for once.

Guido’s mole reports a flurry of Westminster activity from the former Prime Mentalist.  Not only did Gordon actually vote last night, he almost made it into the Chamber today. But not quite! He stopped short behind the Speaker’s chair.

So, Leveson aside, why is Brown in town? Guido can report that instead of representing the people of Kirkcaldy, as he is paid to do, Gordon was showing a mysterious balding gentleman around the estate.

A doorman’s conversation was overheard by one witty Member:

Doorman: Who was that then?

MP: The former Prime Minster.

DM: No, no with him.

Boom-tish.

Lord Patten huffed and puffed as he told Tory MP Philip Davies that he was deluded if he thought he was “going to do a diary for you in order to satisfy some populist pursuit of somebody you didn’t want to run an organisation which you don’t want to exist, you are kidding yourself,” He then tried humour to hide the fact that he is a part time Chairman and struggling to justify the £110,000 of licence fee payers cash:

“I think it’s a thoroughly impertinent question. I think you’re entitled to know how much time I’m spending, I think you’re entitled to put down freedom of information requests for how many days I spend in the office, or how many days I spend doing other things. Do you want to know my toilet habits? What else do you want to know?”

Apparently asking about how BBC money is spent is “impertinent”.

The baiting-Tory wasn’t going to take it lying down though, telling Patten, “I know it’s difficult for you to refrain from being patronising’ and asking him to try at least shed some light on his ”grand title, which I’m sure would have appealed to you”. Miaow.

A laughable interview on the Today programme this morning by Sir Ian Kennedy, the head of IPSA and the man in charge of a review of MPs’ pay. Kennedy says it is time to trust MPs again on expenses:

“Two and a half years ago Parliament was mired in controversy about expenses scandal and looks what’s happened in those two and a half years: an independent body has been created, we’ve addressed business costs, we’ve addressed expenses, we’ve got a good system in place which works. What we’ve got to do is say, look, 2009 is not back with us. MPs are not in a situation where they’re not to be trusted and that there’s no system in place. Quite the opposite, there’s a new system and it’s quite unfair to say that MPs are not to be trusted.”

He must have forgotten all about Stephen Dorrell, Denis MacShane, Margaret Moran, 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. And that’s just during the last month…