LET'S get to the heart of this week's shenanigans

I mark GCSE exams. I mustn't mark the scripts of any schools I have any links with. If I fib and do this, I'll be sacked for possible cheating.

At work, I used to be responsible for a budget of £100K. For any job over £100 I had to get three different quotes to show I was looking for value. If I didn't I was in serious trouble with the auditors.

In whatever job I have done, drinking alcohol while at work was a sacking offence.

These restrictions on my behaviour seem entirely reasonable.

Yet MPs seem to think they can mark their own work, do not need to demonstrate financial value in the same way as I had to and can, as of next week, freely imbibe while performing their functions.

Why are our supposed betters allowed to conduct their affairs in a way that would get me sacked?

David Lewis

Church End,

Cawood, Selby

... JUST when I thought the Tory government couldn’t get any more dodgy, it does just that.

First Boris orders his party to vote against holding an MP-led inquiry into the current David Cameron lobbying scandal and appoints his own lawyer to investigate instead.

Then he decides top civil servants should declare any second jobs which carry a conflict of interest.

Shouldn’t these already grossly overpaid mandarins be too busy in their primary job?

The suggestion that top civil servants, like their political pawn masters, become tempted to stick their hand in the till will come as no surprise to the citizens of York.

The most shocking thing is that the government has decided they now need to declare these second jobs so that everything is transparent.

No, that’s not how you respond to obvious conflicts of interest, you ban them from holding these jobs altogether.

Dr Scott Marmion,

Woodthorpe,

York

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