What is the definition of “cool” in the House of Commons? I think it must be the 20 or so MPs who have yet to pick up their envelope from Sir Thomas Legg.

An MP informant spotted them and tells me they are sitting in a cardboard box, unloved, uncollected.

There’s still plenty of anger in the Commons, though it only surfaced in Prime Minister’s Question Time for a second or two when MPs muttered angrily as Nick Clegg got to his feet (he’s called for Legg to go wider and tougher and isn’t flavour of the month in there). read more

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Forty to 50 Labour MPs are now in Committee Room 11 at the Commons letting off steam with the Chief Whip and Harriet Harman.

It is a fuller briefing that was promised to MPs last night at the PLP explaining how we got into a position where MPs are being asked to pay back invoiced, cleared, claimed amounts they had been told were all within the rules.

They are hoping for co-ordinated action that will see Thomas Legg back down and stop making retrospective cash payback demands.

But many MPs will simply pay back the money to save, as they see it, what remains of their reputation and not join in a collective revolt. read more

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Latest is that a bundle of letters to MPs will be delivered into the internal mail system in the Commons either late morning or lunchtime. MPs should open them some time today.

As mentioned here earlier the Legg audit is judging the Fees Office as much as the MPs.

It doesn’t matter if your claim was cleared by the Fees Office, the question is whether you abided by the spirit of the rules, claiming for expenses incurred in the pursuance of MPs’ duties.

What particularly annoys MPs is that Legg has put what they think are arbitrary numbers on what constitutes breaching the spirit of the rules and what doesn’t.

So Gordon Brown’s cleaning bill, to take a high-profile example, is deemed excessive. One minister who was off to check his post and emails and see if he had to pay back more money was as furious as a Tory frontbencher I just met. read more

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When’s Legg over? A traditional summer holiday question… now being asked in the corridors of Westminster.

Sir Thomas Legg is the man heading the inquiry into all MPs’ expenses claimed over the last four years.

This is the piece of work that Gordon Brown called for and it could mean still more pain for MPs before the year is out.

There was an assumption in some quarters that this piece of auditing, which is meant to see whether MPs broke the rules “as they stood at the time”, back between 2004-8, was going to be a bit of a sop.

The rules were, after all, designed to be flexible and were difficult to breach.

But Sir Thomas Legg will be looking at all MPs and only the Conservative MPs have so far been subjected to systematic scrutiny by anyone other than the Daily Telegraph (the Tories hired their own team of auditors and applied a harsher if arbitrary “smell” test to claims).

Legg and his team are going through all MPs alphabetically (the first MPs, with surnames A-D, can expect initial verdicts in the post by the end of July – they get a right of reply/challenge and can even go to the Standards and Privileges Committee if they don’t like the verdict). read more

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