Tory revolt against Cameron's anti-sleaze show

Conservative MEPs are today in open revolt over the announcement made yesterday by their supposed leader David Cameron to reform the Tories' system of auditing their MEPs expenses, after it was revealed that a secret Conservative memo referred to his proposals as, amongst other things, "half-baked" and "a PR disaster that would "snatch defeat from the jaws of victory"

The story is all over today's papers and there is confusion over the source of the memo. The Guardian and Sun seem to think it came from the pen of arch-eurosceptic Roger Helmer, while the Telegraph claims that it was written by a group of several Conservative MEPs. Either way, it is hard to imagine that the author's identity will stay secret for too long. The memo is incredibly indiscreet; it is astonishing that Tory MEPs are threatening to sue the Conservative leader if he carried out his threat to de-select them!

The memo was found on a photocopier in Strasbourg. It says a lot about the incompetence of the Conservatives that they would leave such an explosive document in a photocopier for anyone to find.

Demonstrating a startling brass neck (even by his standards), Dan Hannan claims that Tory MEPs are actually the cleanest, and saying that Labour MEPs are keeping "schtum for a reason"! Well, the reason would be that since 2000, Labour MEPs have had their accounts annually reviewed by an independent auditor to make sure that they are in order and in compliance with the Parliament's rules. As Labour's leader in Europe, Gary Titley said yesterday, "Finally, after eight years, the Tory Party has caught up with the Labour MEPs' regime for dealing with expenses. The difference is that all 19 Labour MEPs have signed up to this, but the evidence is many Tory MEPs will have to be dragged, kicking and screaming, into doing the right thing.”

I have to say that Lib Dem Norman Baker's line that "the words 'Tory and sleaze' go together as easily as cheese and sandwich" is also worth a chuckle (but it would rhyme better if it was 'sandwich and cheese')

The memo's release took the thunder out of Cameron's press conference given yesterday to announce a so-called 'deep clean' of his MEPs expenses. It wrecked his latest attempt to portray himself as taking a tough line with the sleazier elements of his party.

Tory leader resigns

So, Giles Chichester has resigned as Tory leader in the European Parliament – their shortest-lived leader ever!

Giles Chichester was once the luckiest politician to be elected. He won the Devon & East Plymouth constituency in 1994 by a whisker, thanks to the Liberal Democrat votes being split by a “Literal Democrat” (spot the difference!) candidate, who did no campaigning, but siphoned off more than 10,000 votes from the Liberal Democrat who would certainly have won by a mile:

G.B. Chichester Conservative 74,953
A.M. Sanders Liberal Democrat 74,253
R.J. Huggett Literal Democrat 10,203


At the following election in 1999 under the new regional PR system, he competed against his Tory MEP colleagues and others for a place high enough on the Conservative list of candidates to guarantee election. The Tory party selection method was a vote among whichever party members turned up to a single general meeting in the region. The South-west is pretty vast, and having the meeting in his very own constituency was no doubt what ensured his survival.

Well, there must be many Tories who now wish he hadn’t been so lucky! But, had the Conservatives followed the example set by Labour MEPs eight years ago in having our spending of staff and office allowances reviewed by an independent external auditor every year to ensure that all monies are properly spent, then maybe they would have avoided such humiliation.

I suppose I should be jumping up and down with glee at another case of Tory trouble, but I'm afraid that for large swathes of public opinion we will all get tarred with the same brush. Parts of the media that never covers the European Parliament’s actual work will cover this in detail - and that is all that some people will ever read or hear about the Parliament. The Eurosceptics will even argue that the system is inherently corrupt and we should scrap it – a line they of course don’t take for similar scandals such as that of Derek Conway MP at Westminster. Yet the answer is the same in both cases: clear, transparent rules, properly applied and enforced.

Tory sleaze

Cameron's astonishing appointment of former minister Jonathon Aitken to head a Tory working party shows how desparate the Tories are to bring back wayward former Conservatives to the fold.

Aitken, who supported UKIP at the last European election, was not only jailed for perjury (having initially tried to sue the journalist who blew his cover!) - he has to this day not revealed what he was up to in the Paris Ritz as a guest of the Saudis while he was defence procurement minister.

I was reminded of some of the other sleaze cases of the last Tory government - far more spectacular than any of the supposed sleaze allegations made nowadays - when Neil Hamilton popped up the other day to accuse the EU of... fraud. Coming from the man who received cash in brown envelopes in return for favours in parliament, this is a bit rich. Hamilton is also UKIP - is there something that magically attracts discredited Tories to them?

But, if they want him back, why don't the Tories appoint Hamilton as head of a working group on parliamentary standards? And Jeffrey Archer on prisons? Cecil Parkinson on child support by absent fathers? John Wakeham (of Enron fame) on corporate social responsibility? And Piers Merchant (of teenage mistress fame, but now Chief Executive of UKIP) on teenage sex?