... an old Scunthorpe joke, along the lines of Typhoo putting the 'T' in Britain. Work it out.
Yes, Elliot Morley has pleaded guilty to dishonestly claiming more than £30,000 in expenses to which he was not entitled. Most of this related to a mortgage that had already been paid off - but which Morley claimed he had forgotten about. If there has been a more preposterous claim in the whole sorry affair of MPs' expenses, I have yet to hear it. To most people, paying off the mortgage is a significant event. You count down the months beforehand, imagining what you are going to be able to do with the hefty wodge that you have been paying to the building society every month for the past 20 or 25 years. But that's when it's your own money, of course. When it's someone else's, what's the fuss? Easy come, easy go.
To Morley's credit, he has realised (or his brief has made him realise) that claiming it was a genuine oversight just wasn't going to wash in front of a jury of normal people, and he has turned in a plea of guilty.
Let's see if we can work out how long this paragon of rectitude is going down for. Devine got 16 months (out in eight, and his brief said he hoped he would be out in four, but let's leave that for the time being). Morley's cheating was around four times the amount that Devine got, and it wasn't even semi-justifiable (Devine was merely claiming under the wrong heading to spend the money on his office; Morley was going for cash in the bank), so let's guess at 16 x 5, or 80 months. Knock off a third for the guilty plea, say 54 months - or four-and-a-half years. That's my calculation. I will be disappointed if it's much less, but I fear it will be. I'll be putting a poll at the top of the blog. Feel free to make a guess. (No prizes, but an honorable mention and your name in 16-point Times Roman in a colour of your choice for whoever gets closest.) Poll runs for a week, and he is due to be sentenced after 12 May.
Incidentally, does anyone else think he looks a bit like Chris Farlowe?
Baby, baby, you're out of time ...
I used to hear him on Farming Today - who would have imagined a politiciain to be such a thief.....
ReplyDeleteTwo years tops, unlike Aitken and Archer he is not guilty of being a Conservative and the Socialist judiciary never jail their own except for the minimum term possible.
ReplyDeleteTTFN :)
I suspect you are right. But I hope not. After all, Devine was part of the Labour Scottish mafia and he was sent down. There's hope.
ReplyDeleteGFGN,
ReplyDeleteHe put the c*nt in Scunthorpe.No matter how long he gets it won't be long enough.Politicians need to learn a lesson that theft,troughing call it what you will is not acceptable,neither is throwing money at extremists in foreign countries no matter that 'we' were bad boys in the dim and distant past.
BTW I am a fellow 'biker' '94 Fireblade & '85 VFR.
NewsboyCap
Until they realise that all the money that they call 'Government money' is actually *our* money that they have in trust, there will always be selfish troughing and spending on vanity projects, whether new offices with meditation rooms or throwing cash at foreign countries so they can appear statesmanlike.
ReplyDeleteNice pair of bikes, by the way.
I met Elliot Morley a couple of time when he was a minister. He seemed like a very hard working chap trying to do the right thing. How could a person like that rip off the public he supposedly committed himself to work for? They seem to be able to bypass the bit that stops normal people doing bad things even when there is no one there to stop them. I think it used to be called self discipline - whatever happened to that?
ReplyDeleteI feel sorry for his wife and kids.
I think many of them genuinely thought it was OK. As you say, a kind of reasonableness bypass. But if you had somehow been responsible for my mortgage payments and I had continued to ask you to pay me despite the loan being paid off, there would be no doubt that you would consider me dishonest. By their works shall ye know them. The only question you need to ask is: if I had had the chance to do that, and thought I would never be found out, would I have done it?
ReplyDelete... after a night on the pop.
ReplyDeleteEighteen months.
ReplyDelete