According to Oakeshott, more than 20 Labour peers are making substantial sums from quango work, 2 Tories are on the gravy train and three LibDems are living it up at the taxpayer’s expense. We are talking six-figure sums here, £600 to £800 a day, with many on over £100,000 a year.

Oakeshott says “Ministers might as well put up an ‘Opposition Peers need not apply’ sign. This is creeping corruption, alongside the shameless sleaze of cash for Labour peerages. New Labour trumpets the need for transparency and diversity. It doesn’t work that way when they hand out jobs to their own Peers.”

Many of the Labour peers who have been appointed to jobs by secretaries of state are former Labour party officials or trade unionists. Baroness Dean of Thornton-le-Fylde, who used to have an official role on Labour’s ruling body, the NEC, now earns £45,802 as chair of an obscure quango which oversees the New Covent Garden Market Flower market. Jobs for the boys and girls…

Baker has a cross-party alliance with Tory Richard Shepherd, and Labour’s Mark Fisher and Plaid Cymru’s Hywel Williams — who have tabled a long list of amendments to the bill.

David Maclean, a Tory MP, introduced this cover-up bill. He’ll be lucky to assemble 100 MPs on a Friday afternoon to stop it being talked out. Guido knows he is a former whip, but he was never that good.

MPs would no doubt want to cover up these types of things.

There will apparently be a gravy train, a wine lake, a butter mountain, a pig trough, porky pies and other entertainments. Philip Davies MP and Gerard Batten MEP will be launching the “London Declaration”, in response to the Berlin Declaration. The invite suggests that you wear anything you like – “anybody dressed as a fat cat politician or as a pig will be particularly welcome.” Guido will try doing his best to help reduce the wine lake.

More details here.

First minister Jack McConnell and Danuta Hubner, European commissioner for regional policy, are among the speakers at a two-day Microsoft ‘government leaders forum’ which takes place in the Scottish parliament.

“The degree of variation in the spend on stationery and allowances, and in some aspects of the travel regime, are not easily explicable,” he says tactfully. “It is so marked that it is bound to give rise to questions about Members’ practice.” Ahh, he does realise they are fiddling.

He intends to press for MPs to pay for at least one of their own homes out of their own pockets. So that will bugger up Geoff Hoon forinstance, who claims at the taxpayer’s expense for his constituency home, despite owning it outright with no mortage. Senior Labour figures like David Blunkett, Jack Straw, John Prescott, Ruth Kelly and Margaret Beckett have fiddled between them hundreds of thousands of pounds in unjustified expenses. Dole cheats go to jail for far smaller frauds.

Unlike Peter Hain, Guido paid for his boy-racer jollies out of his own pocket rather than charge it to the taxpayer. Guido’s flights and helicopters were at his own expense. Peter Hain charged to the taxpayer the £10,754 costs of his flights and expenses. There is no political justification for this, he is just enjoying himself at the taxpayers expense. No doubt he will claim some bogus “security” justification. Look at his smile in these pictures, he is laughing at you the taxpayer.

Since when has a playboy lifestyle been the chargeable expense of a minister of the crown? He should get his turbocharged snout out of the trough and pay back every penny.

Hain flew in specially chartered planes to a Dublin rugby international and two Sligo motor racing events within the past year. The bill for Hain’s costly jollies comes to £10,754. Hain, a keen motorsports fan, flew with one official last October to Sligo to attend a motorsports event. The cost of this one-day trip was £2,491. In February he flew to Dublin to attend an Ireland versus Wales rugby match. Three officials went with him and the bill for the one-day trip came to £5,002. In March, he was back in Sligo again to attend another Rally Ireland event. Two officials flew with him on a charter plane for a two-day stay which cost £3,271.

The use of taxpayer-funded charter flights to attend jollies has even provoked the Conservative Party’s Northern Ireland spokesman, David Lidington: “Everyone accepts the need for Ministers to travel, sometimes at short notice, but these three trips sound like costly jollies at taxpayers’ expense.” Guido thinks Hain can get a bloody Ryanair flight to the rugby at his own expense like the rest of us.