Perhaps you will remember that a few weeks ago I related the story of a certain Mr Wilshire, MP for Spelthorne in England who had, contrary to Commons’ regulations, paid his expenses into a company which he and his partner owned. You may also remember that, busy man that he is, he forgot to register the company for tax purposes, or National Insurance purposes, and, I suppose in the way that these things go, the silly old sausage completely forgot to pay any of these taxes that the rest of us are burdened with. I’m sure I won’t have to remind you that his partner had some sort of animal nesting in her hair, which may account for some of their forgetfulness.
You may also remember that according to his version of the tale, he decided that he had let people down and so he decided to stand down as the MP. Not right away, you understand (thereby losing a fat parcel of goodies), but, he was so ashamed he decided to stay on till next May.
Of course the official version was somewhat different. It went like this: the Tory Chief Whip had him in and told him he was a bit of an old disgrace and just the sort of chap that gave the Conservatives a bad name, so Dave the leader had decided that he would have to go. Oh well, it was close and it’s easy to mix these things up.
So now Mr Wilshire has, on Commons stationery, and using Commons prepaid envelopes (so as not to dig into any of that profit he was making), written a 2-page letter to every single Spelthorne constituent explaining his side of the debacle. Wasn’t that kind of him?
I won’t bother you with all the trivial details of the letter, in fact I don’t even know them all, but the Daily Telegraph thought this was a particularly interesting part of the narrative, and I agree.
Mr Wilshire wrote: “The witch hunt against MPs in general will undermine democracy. It will weaken parliament - handing yet more power to governments. Branding a whole group of people as undesirables led to Hitler's gas chambers.”
I think that in the first part of that statement he’s kinda mixed things up a little. It’s the fact that so many MPs turned out to be nothing better than cheap little benefit cheats that has undermined parliament and thus democracy. Indeed the so-called witch-hunt has probably strengthened what little democracy we have left. The second half of the statement is beneath contempt. To compare what is happening to MPs with the holocaust death camps is below the level that we expect even from the likes of Wilshire.
It is a travesty that this odious little man is allowed to continue in his post as MP, on his salary of around £63,000 and make insulting statements on our stationery and deliver them at our expense.
