So, Mr Cameron. Your approach to the expenses scandal’s not looking like such a great idea anymore, is it? Deliberately painting your own team as much blacker villains than they were so as to cover up your own indiscretions seems, oddly enough, not to have made you too many friends. Strange, that.
And, mirabile dictu, it turns out that the monitoring systems introduced to police those oh-so-wicked MPs cost vastly more than the puny excess claims Speaker Martin’s hapless Keystone Cops had encouraged. Says Benedict Brogan: ""We have created in IPSA a legal monster that is costing far more than we thought and isn't working," one Cabinet minister told me. "David knows this and wants to fix it. But the politics of the thing are terrible. We legislated in haste, and now we are stuffed."
In the meantime, it turns out that unless you are as well-heeled as Adam Afriyie (or David Cameron), the new system means a number of MPs running up vast overdrafts. “And in tomorrow’s news, three MPs who lost their seats last week at the 2015 election have now declared themselves bankrupt, with debts in excess of £100,000 each..”
You don’t think…it isn’t possible that…actually, the vast majority of the MPs before weren’t so unreasonable with most of their claims after all?
Well, don’t say I didn’t warn you…
