Given Labour is now attacking civil servants for having the temerity to purchase stationery, Guido’s working his own way through’s the opposition’s shining record of handling taxpayer cash with sensitivity and respect.

The Shadow Foreign Secretary David Lammy managed to escape the expenses scandal relatively unscathed, though that’s partly because his own expenses mishandling hit the headlines many years prior to 2009. Having already had his money grubbing fingers burnt, he learnt his lesson early before some of his subsequently jailed comrades…

In October 2004, the Haringey Advertiser revealed that taxpayers had been forking out for Lammy to rent a second home in South London, despite his own constituency home in Haringey being just 28 minutes from Westminster by tube. This arrangement cost taxpayers £12,041 between April 2003 and March 2004.

In 2009 the then-higher education minister’s criticism of a Public Accounts Committee report into government waste resulted in the Treasury putting out a memo warning that such behaviour could result in ministers being censured. According to the November 2009 edition of Public Servant magazine:

“An attack by two ministers on parliamentary reports revealing waste and incompetence in their departments has provoked the Treasury to warn that ministers will face public censure if they make immediate statements to the media on future reports.

Statements by defence minister Quentin Davies and higher education minister David Lammy have led to a new Whitehall member to accounting officers banning attacks on Public Accounts Committee (PAC) reports before the Treasury can make a considered response.”

He wasted taxpayer cash, then complained when parliamentary committees scrutinised government waste. Yet more evidence that in government Labour would waste taxpayers’ money… 

See also: Previous expense fiddlers: Douglas Alexander and Yvette Cooper‘s appraisals.