And You Thought Lunatics Couldn't Stand

In the old language of the bill that determines who can stand for Westminster along with undischarged bankrupts and peers of the realm the other grouping is lunatics. Well with the letters from Sir Thomas Legg's independent audit about to picked up in MPs inboxes it looks like the later may indeed have sneaked in.

You'd have thought over a summer where they could meet their constituents and actually get a fell for the anger on the street about MP's expenses that some lessons may have been learned. One of those is that they would look at an independent review and take it at face value. The major parties have all agreed to do that with the Sir Christopher Kelly review of the expenses procedures, but why is this audit different. One source said:

"Nobody really minds paying back small amounts. What we object to is being named and shamed in this process when the rules change retrospectively."

The fact that the Times could only attribute the above to a source and not a named MP shows the depth of the issue. The whole issue has always been one of transparency. If the expenses in the first place had been more transparent we would never have got into such a mess. I'm not saying there still mighted have been some fiddling, but it would have been easier to pick up, and earlier.

What we may have today is hundreds of lunatics signing their own P45 from the Palace if they don't accept that what they claimed wasn't wholly and exclusively for business use when they claimed for it, and are now being asked to pay it back.