MORE RANDOM THOUGHTS

It now costs around £70 to fill an average family car with petrol, and that this is worrying for a “hard working British family”, who may only have around £250 disposable income, and with rent of £80 and council tax of a further £60 this can make life difficult. You could see the pain in the prime minister’s face. He really feels for us “hard-working British families”. He hasn’t said how he feels about spinster ladies and single people. I wonder how he feels about pensioners whose only way of getting shopping is to use their car. How does he think they manage with the most expensive fuel in the world in this oil rich nation? Indeed how does the poor man manage himself?

Mr Richard Baker is starting to campaign for re-election by bringing up the case of Abdelbaset Mohmed Ali al Megrahi. He wanted to know how many letters and emails were received (and has been told) then he wanted them broken down into how many were for and how many against, and then he wanted to know how many civil servants were on the “Lockerbie team”, and then he wanted to know how many man hours had gone into dealing with the matter, and then he wanted to know how much it cost. (He’s very inquisitive, isn’t he?) He appears to be very concerned about how much this particular item has cost the Scottish taxpayer. I wonder if he’s considered how much time it would take and money it would cost to provide him with all this information so that he can go electioneering on it?

Mr Gray has started his election campaign, 100 days before the election, by highlighting (predictably) 100 SNP broken promises. They included promises which the SNP had not made. He also misquoted the SNP manifesto at least 20 times and mentioned items which are the responsibility of other parliaments. Moreover he included things that the SNP had brought forward and had been voted down by parliament. So as usual Mr Gray got his facts all wrong and mixed up promises broken with policies voted out by parliament. God help us if he is ever First Minister, but if he is, he will be able to rely on me to point out every single promise he breaks.

Our senior police officers were given bonuses amounting to more than £400,000 across the country last year, at a time when police forces are having to slash money from their budgets. Colin McKerracher, CBE, QPM, LlB, Chief Constable of Grampian Police, has suggested that part of the money confiscated as proceeds of crime could be used to subsidise the police in future. Could this be because he was one of only two Chief Constables that accepted his bonus? It seems to me that, like in every other walk of life, those at the top will always look after themselves, regardless of the effects on other people. Me me me me me is the motto of the senior people.

John Taylor has been found guilty of stealing over £11,000 of public money. As a barrister surely he must have been bright enough to realise that the “advice” given by fellow peers that “any family connection with an address” was enough to justify claiming that it was a first residence for the purposes of claiming expenses, especially as if he had never even been to the house, never mind lived there. I hope his lordship will have time in the pokey to reflect on his limited understanding of the legal system, and perhaps do some revision. He is safe in the knowledge, however, that even if he gets more than a year’s sentence he will still be able to resume his seat in the House upon release, and restart his expenses business.

WELL, WOULD YOU BELIEVE IT: A NOBLE LORD APPEARS TO HAVE MISLED THE HOUSE AS TO HIS ADDRESS

Goodness, doesn’t time fly when the blogosphere is falling down around you. It hardly seems seven days since we outed another little piggy peer with his snout deep in the trough that we have to keep refilling from our taxes.

This week I’d like to present to you His Nobleness, The Baron Taylor of Warwick, who has been caught using someone else’s home address to claim thousands of pounds in expenses. The Noble Lord told the House of Lords that his main home was a terraced house in Oxford in which he did not actually live (well, he didn’t tell them that bit, obviously). He also neglected to tell them that he didn’t own it either.

Worse still, he never bothered to mention his “arrangement” to the person who actually owns the house. Right, I know it’s complicated but I’ll try to explain. Watch out for the tricky bit... there’s a Mr Taylor and a Lord Taylor; they are not one and the same:

The house belongs to a certain Tristram Wyatt who is an academic at the university. Mr Wyatt’s companion, Mr Robert Taylor, is the step-nephew of the Noble Lord. Mr Taylor has said that Lord Taylor does not live there and has never lived there. Mr Wyatt was not aware that his address was being used. The neighbours have confirmed that the only people who live there are Mr Wyatt and Mr Taylor.

Lord Taylor, on the other hand, lives in Ealing with his family. However, but telling the House of Lords that his main residence was outside of the capital he has been able to claim expenses to the tune of £70,000, between 2001 and 2007. Expenses to which, needless to say, he was not entitled.

When confronted with this earlier in the year Lord Taylor said that he lived with his mother in the Midlands (of England). His Lordship seemingly has a short memory, for his mother died in 2001. Presumably he knew about this, but it slipped his mind.

Sometimes you wonder at the arrogance of these people. First the man uses his dead mother’s address and then his step-nephew’s address, and it never occurs to him that he will be caught. The worst of it is that Lord Taylor is a barrister (not just noble, but learned as well). In short, you'd think he'd know better

One a week... sometimes more, and yet, I heard someone on the radio this morning telling us that there were just a few bad apples in the barrel.

I wonder when it will occur to them that it might be an idea to drop all this nonsense about Rt Hon and Noble when they address each other. They are not honourable, they are dishonourable; they are not noble, they are ignoble. In turns we laugh at them or are spitting mad at them. They have disgraced our parliament. They are making us a laughing stock.

I do not wish to defame Baron Taylor, but from the evidence presented in The Times, it does seem that the man is both a liar and a thief. Why he is not locked up?