ON MY first newspaper job, expenses were seen as a legitimate way to compensate for poor pay.

The editor, scattering cigar ash in all directions, told me off for not claiming enough, and showed me how to fill out the form. We were paid weekly in cash and the expenses came in an additional brown envelope, which usually found its way to the pub.

Being mostly office based, my expenses these days amount to little. But in all my times of claiming expenses, I have never worked for an employer who lets you claim sums of up to £250 without a receipt. Or one who gives the nod to paying one of your children £45,000 for unspecified work carried out for you while he was away at university for three years.

Yet both of these accounting practices apparently occur in the House of Commons.

With a son at university, and the bank account being the laughable and echoing void it is, I have missed a trick. If only I had thought to become an MP, public money could have been siphoned off to my son, and he wouldn't even have had to do anything much to earn it.

But it's a little late for that now.

Such thoughts arise after Tory MP Derek Conway was stripped of the Tory whip last week (and, yes, that is a sentence into which a snigger might wish to poke its disrespectful nose). He was also suspended temporarily from the House of Commons.

Mr Conway doesn't believe he has done anything wrong. Never mind that his "family benefit" saw his two sons earn a reputed £80,000 between them while at university for, er, "helping their dad".

In an interview at the weekend, Mr Conway said: "I am not a crook." Perhaps so, but anyone looking for other labels could be excused for stumbling on the one marked "shameless scrounger".

The lesson in all this, apart from the one about how certain MPs seem to exist just to confirm the public's worst suspicions, is that Parliamentary expenses should be justified and accounted, line for line, just as they are in virtually any other job.

The party leaders are now making the right noises, with particular attention to employing family members, but will the self-regulating MPs manage to cleanse themselves? We shall see.

At least this is a financial scandal the public can understand, unlike all that business about Peter Hain. How on earth could he have needed donations of £100,000 to run for deputy leadership of the Labour Party? How could such an unglamorous contest have commanded such dizzying sums? Nope, me neither.


GOOD to see that Sir Nicholas and Lady Ann Winterton have been keeping their end up, too.

The Tory husband-and-wife MP duo are reported to claim more than £20,000 a year in Parliamentary expenses for a London flat on which they have already paid off the mortgage (using public money). Apparently, this is considered to be in poor taste, but within the rules. Perhaps those rules need changing. The flat, incidentally, is said to have risen in value from around £120,000 to £400,000.

Anyway, the Wintertons are good value. Four years ago, Ann was suspended for making a sick joke about the 20 Chinese cockle-pickers who drowned at Morecambe Bay. She apologised and was accepted back into the Tory fold.

Two years before that, much the same thing happened after she told a joke detrimental to Pakistanis.

How encouraging to see that political correctness hasn't stopped this Tory lady from her forthright, and seemingly highly profitable, career.

While her sense of humour may cause her to apologise unreservedly (until the next time), the expenses she claims with her husband will presumably result in no apologies at all.


CAN you tell your life story in six words? An American publication, Smith Magazine, is running a competition along these lines. Here is my offering: "Open window. Long fall. Still here." Do you have any similar suggestions?