Mutterings around the Palace of Westminster this morning as Bercow announces he is rightly slashing £12 million from the Commons budget. Select Committees have had £800,000 pulled from their junket kitty and £500,000 pounds worth of the booze subsidy is going. Writing to MPs last night he said he pledged to “bring cafeteria prices into line with typical workplace venues and bar prices into line with a competitively priced high street pub chain.” That’s a Wetherspoons then.

It’s a good start but the subsidy has clearly not been lifted completely. Bercow deserves some credit here but he has hardly been an austerity Speaker. Bag carriers and hacks were more than a little disgruntled when he announced that Bellamy’s bar, fresh from it’s £48,000 make over, was to be shut down and turned into a non-sound proofed crèche. Late and well over budget, more than a £200,000 has been wasted on a PR stunt…

Despite turning his back on the Tories and slamming Dave in the leadership election, suggesting that the combination of “Eton, hunting, shooting and lunch at Whites” made him the wrong man for the job, the embattled Speaker has resorted to plastering images of his old leader all over his election material. He also uses Tory fonts. What would Sally say?

Worse than that though is the blatant spin about his expenses. “In the latest available figures, only 7 MPs claimed less in expenses than John.” While that may well be true for the last quarter, Bercow has been living at the taxpayers additional expense in the Speaker’s  plush grace and favour pad in the Palace of Westminster, which begs the question, why is he claiming anything at all?

And lest we forget, in all the years running up to the current set of figures Bercow has fluctuated between the rank of 1st and 3rd on the troughing scale.

Sally “the alley” Bercow, the loose-lipped spouse of the Speaker, lives at the taxpayer’s expense in the Palace of Westminster and far from their Monday Club days she now spends her days pursuing her new found anti-Tory agenda. Eyebrows were justifiably raised when she declared she wanted to run for Westminster Council as a Labour candidate.

Piggy backing on her husband’s neutral role she has ingratiated herself with the upper echelons of the Labour Party. Like the pocket lining of past Speaker’s wives, Sally is using her husband’s status for her own political gain. It seems common sense has prevailed and Mrs Bercow will have to move out of the Speaker’s residence for the duration of the campaign if she does run. A good start, but what about the obvious abuse of public property the rest of the time?

After Guido’s story yesterday about the controversial and murky “Friends of Speaker Bercow“ fund-raising group, it seems a member of UKIP in the Speaker’s constituency has put a complaint in to John Lyon about a letter he received. Guido imagines Bercow wouldn’t have been so stupid to have used the Speaker’s stationary to beg for money, but the secretary of the fund has said Bercow was responsible for drawing up and passing on names. If the allegations that potential donors were invited to the Palace of Westminster are investigated then this could be a serious problem for the embattled squeaker…

Bercow must be feeling the heat from Farage’s growing campaign in his hitherto extremely safe seat. It seems he’s resorted to playing on his position as Speaker to raise money. Local Tory members and donors have been surprised to receive begging letters and phone calls from a front calling itself the “Friends of Speaker Bercow” asking for help to fill a £40,000 election war chest. It turns out the politically neutral Speaker’s Office has been mysteriously handing out useful names and addresses to the fund-raising unit (whose name, you’ll note, even includes his “non-political” title,) who then call up asking for cash.

In what has all the hallmarks of a well oiled unit, a second prong of attack is then engaged: After the request for cash,  a well-timed invitation to drinks in the Palace is popped through the letterbox. Conflicted Tory members and councillors have, meanwhile, been warned that they will be deselected and expelled at the first hint of disloyalty or for speaking out about the letters by those still loyal to Bercow. Frank Donlon the Secretary of the organisation just confirmed that Bercow had passed on names.

See also Tony & Cherie’s Godless Christmas Card

You won’t believe this in the Mail on Sunday.

The government’s Bill introduced by Harriet Harman yesterday proposes establishing a body to be known as the “Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority” and an officer known as the “Commissioner for Parliamentary Investigations”.

The five members of the IPSA will be

“appointed by the Queen upon an Address of the House of Commons. A motion may only be made only with the agreement of the Speaker for a candidate selected on merit on the basis of fair and open competition and approved by a Speaker’s Committee. Members will be removable only in response to an Address of both Houses. There will be requirements that one member of the IPSA should have accountancy experience, that one member should have Parliamentary experience, and that one member be a holder of or have held high judicial office.”

The Commissioner will be appointed the same way.  There will, according to the Bill

“be a Speaker’s Committee for the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority charged with exercising the functions given to it under the Bill – in particular, approving the selection of persons to be members of the IPSA and the Commissioner.”

Do you see the flaw in this “independent” Comissioner and Authority?  Members will be drawn from the establishment and their selection approved by the Speaker’s appointees.  Would we permit criminals to choose their own judge and jury?

This is a stitch up, we don’t need more rules and self-selected regulators, we need reform of the expenses system,  together with clarity, transparency and enforcement of the rules.  The voters will kick out MPs if they can identify crooks, in this sense in a democracy voters are the ultimate regulator of politicians.  This whole idea is ill-founded, we don’t need to intermediate democracy with another quango or committee, this approach has already failed.

We need only to empower voters with enough information so that they can determine the truth about those who seek to represent them.  The truth is all we need, not redactions, not more quangocrats.