Blog posts tagged "MPs expenses"

June 1, 2009 12:15 pm No Comments

Gordon Brown talks of radical constitutional change. So does David Cameron. So does Nick Clegg. But is it going to happen? It was the 19th century radical John Bright who conjured the phrase “Mother of Parliaments”. It’s a cosy, reassuring concept and has often been distorted to suggest Westminster is the “Mother of Parliaments”.

May 28, 2009 11:36 am 57 Comments

If the expenses scandal is about anything, it is about the public’s right to know what politicians do in their name and with their money. Yet as the parties attempt to purge the transgressors, all the indications are that the same secrecy and attempted cover-up that led to the leaking of MPs’ expenses to the [...]

May 26, 2009 10:47 am 15 Comments

A hundred and fifty thousand people over 10 days, packing events and discussions that range through politics, philosophy, economics and high culture. The Hay festival appears if anything to have benefited from the recession. “Stay at home” Britain has come in its droves. I have never seen the place fuller.

May 22, 2009 8:30 am 48 Comments

I have been conducting an interesting correspondence with both Tony Blair’s office and the House of Commons commission which is currently dealing with MPs expenses. This follows my posting re. the shredding of Tony Blair’s expenses. A number of UK news outlets – the Times, Telegraph and Daily Mail among them – “revealed” that Blair’s [...]

May 21, 2009 6:52 pm No Comments

How convenient, the Whitsun break. Have you ever wondered how many weeks the political classes absent themselves in a year? But the problem today is not absenteeism. In some cases it’s a lack of it.

May 20, 2009 10:10 am No Comments

I first set eyes on Gordon Brown at Edinburgh University in 1970. We were both involved in student protests in our respective universities and I’d been invited from Liverpool University to give a talk to him and his fellow protesters on the campus in Edinburgh.

May 19, 2009 11:13 am 149 Comments

This is a heck of a day – today, Tuesday 19 May. We’re in the midst of a full-blown constitutional crisis. The Speaker is suddenly resigning (2.30pm). Gordon Brown has summoned an emergency press conference at 5.30. There is a febrile political atmosphere. Nobody knows what the course of events will be.

9:51 am 10 Comments

spent yesterday afternoon in the environs of the House of Commons. An extraordinary experience. Normally, ostentatiously crawling with MPs and peers anxious to be recognised, stopped and interviewed – yesterday the place was completely deserted.

8:35 am No Comments

The Telegraph editor-in-chief, Will Lewis, has been telling friends of the extraordinary night his newspaper went to press with the first of its revelations. In the middle of the evening he gets a call from the prime minister, Gordon Brown. Mr Brown is well aware of what is about to happen. His call is not [...]

May 18, 2009 3:55 pm 60 Comments

There has still been no explanation forthcoming as to why, amid all the other expenses details to have emerged from the Commons, only one named MP’s expenses seem to have been shredded. It has been reported that other MPs’ expenses were also shredded. But I can only find the name of one MP to whom [...]