After Blackburn, I had promised never to put myself again through the horrors of standing as an independent parliamentary candidate. But the sleazthat has been revealed is only a symptom of the moral laxity and low quality of our MPs, as revealed in their endorsement of illegal war, torture, curtailment of civil liberties, the Ponzi scheme economy… I could go on.

But where to stand? After Blackburn, I refuse to stand in any constituency that does not contain at least one bookshop. Nobody can comprehend the true disaster of the collapse of our public education system, without going to Blackburn. No wonder New Labour have to collect in their postal ballots and fill them in for them.

I had pretty well resolved to raise the anti-sleaze banner against Douglas Hogg, but he seems to have run away already. Of course, by-elections may alter the equation, but otherwise I should be interested to hear any suggestions.

Tim Ireland, incidentally, has done Nadine Dorries up like a kipper.

http://www.bloggerheads.com/

Michael Martin was a rotten speaker, pushed into the job by New Labour because he is the loyalist’s loyalist, having never shown any evidence that he can think. He was never qualified for the job in any way.

But the sight of the troughing toffs ganging up to make a ritual sacrifice of a pleb in the hope that the news agenda will then “move on”, is deeply unedifying.

If this were sufficient of a constitutional crisis for the extreme measure of sacking a Speaker, it is certainly sufficient for the resignation as MPs of the worst individual troughers.

A general election will be best. But unless there are at the very least several by-elections, the MPs who pressured Martin to go will be revealed as simple hypocrites and scapegoat-tetherers.

Seems that Peter McKay at The Daily Mail has read The Catholic Orangemen of Togo. He published my anecdote about Prince Philip’s views on MPs, a few hours before I did!

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1183970/PETER-MCKAY-Crown-sits-uneasy-crisis.html

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2009/05/prince_philip_o.html

From Nadine Dorries’ Blog. Republished Without Permission.

This is a photo of troughing Tory MP Nadine Dorries at the Classical Brit awards. The British taxpayer pays over £20,000 a year to maintain her constituency home in Bedfordshire, because she declares she lives at her main home – in the Cotswolds!

Dorries has admitted deliberately concealing from her constituents that she has her main home neither in her constituency, nor near Parliament.

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2009/05/iain_dale_is_a.html#comments

Dorries’ guest and escort on this occasion, the one looking slightly less stupid in the photo, is Iain Dale, the Tory blogger. Dale has robustly defended Dorries’ home claim on the taxpayer on his blog as “Within the rules”. At the same time, Dale has condemned as “Shameless” Dorries’ fellow Bedfordshire MP, Margaret Moran, for having her second home in Southampton, which Dale calls “100 miles from the constituency and 100 miles from London”.

Just like the Cotswolds, in fact. So why is the same thing OK for Dorries but shameless for Moran? Because Dorries is Tory, Moran is Labour and Dale is a hypocrite.

But at least he has a fun and free social life.

Update: More good stuff on Nadine Dorries’ expenses here. I hope that the good voters of North Norfolk note that Dale endorses all of this, and continue to have the good sense to reject him at the ballot box.

http://www.liberalconspiracy.org/2009/05/17/more-questions-about-nadine-dorries-expenses/

From The Catholic Orangemen of Togo, p. 132, on the Duke of Edinburgh’s visit to the Ghanaian parliament:

“The Prince laughed heartily, and we arrived at the Parliament building in high good spirits.

There he was first shown to a committee room where he was introduced to senior MPs of all parties.

“How many Members of Parliament do you have?” he asked.

“Two hundred,” came the answer.

“That’s about the right number,” opined the Prince, “We have six hundred and fifty MPs, and most of them are a complete bloody waste of time.”

Perhaps Prince Philip had a point.

The striking MP troughing story today is about MP Ben Chapman, who was allowed to continue claiming his mortgage payments despite having paid off his £279,000 mortgage. This still shocks despite eleven solid days of this.

One fascinating thing is just how many MPs appear to have been able to pay off their large mortgages, despite only having a salary of £68,000 per year. That speaks volumes.

Let us pause to remember the biggest criminal in the House of Commons, Tessa Jowell, who not only paid off her mortgage, but did so three times, using Mafia money.

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2006/02/normality_and_t.html

Hopefully we will see what Jpwell’s expenses claims looked like during this fascinating period.

Most of you appear to read this blog at work, as readership drops at the weekend. So please do look at this piece I did on the really appalling hypocrisy of Tory blogger Iain Dale.

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2009/05/iain_dale_is_a.html#comments

Iain has the number 1 blog on the Wikio rankings. If people want to read blogs that are simply a vehicle for party propaganda, that of course is their right. But I would hate people to be under the illusion they were getting anything more thoughtful or independent just because it is a new media fomat.

Nadine Dorries’ admission that she deliberately concealed from her constituents that she lives neither in London nor in her constituency, is appalling. Dale and Dorries are close – he was recently her escort and guest to the Classical Brit awards at the Royal Albert Hall (another freebie for the tireless trougher Dorries?). But his defence of Dorries, when he viciously attacks non-Tory MPs for the same kind of offence, shows Dale up for what he is.

Dale is in fact a double hypocrite. Having defended Dorries for claiming £22,000 a year for a constituency home when her main home is in the Cotswolds, but attacked Labour’s Margaret Moran for a similar offence, he then lays in to the Telegraph editor for defending his own friends:

The allegation is that the Telegraph went soft on Ed Balls and Yvette Cooper because Telegraph editor Will Lewis is a drinking and Karaoke buddy of Mr Balls.

When Dale himself had done precisely that for his friend Dorries! The truth is that both Lewis and Dale are both part of an intricately connected metropolitan clique who lord it over the rest of us.

And Dale then goes on to produce a self-righteous ten point candidates’ pledge of his own, which includes:

I will continue to live in the constituency, among the community I serve

Looks like your pledge would exclude Dorries then Iain, doesn’t it?

http://www.iaindale.blogspot.com/

Another one of Dale’s ten personal pledges reveals the weasel nature of his words.

I will be a full time MP with no jobs outside politics

Note the “No jobs outside politics”. Dale has managed to make a good living from hoovering up various streams of Tory gravy for years. Plainly he intends to maintain these income streams inside politics if elected.

Or he would pledge:

“I will be a full time MP with no other job”, full stop.

The real problem is, that the astounding hypocrisy of Dale’s defence of Dorries while hammering Margaret Moran for essentially the same offence, shows he is completely biased towards a Tory, to the exclusion of thoughts of natural justice. And that must cast into severe doubt another one of his candidates’ pledges:

I will serve all my constituents, regardless of their politics

Only serve the Tories rather better than others, one might suspect from the Dorries case.

For a party hack, Dale is remarkably thin-skinned. He commented on my post:

And all because I linked to a post by Charles Crawford which you didn’t like.

I thought you were bigger than this. But clearly not.

Why do you always have to be so personal. “Stinking hypocrite”. No reasoning. Just insults.

I used to really think you were a person worth reading and engaging with. I no longer do.

How very sad you have reduced your blog to this level.

Actually, this has nothing at all to do with Iain linking to Charles Crawford. I was not in the least upset by that. In fact, I was so not upset by it, I’ll do it myself. Here is Charles’ criticism of me:

http://charlescrawford.biz/N5A207442111

Charles has a different political view to mine. We argue fiercely. But he is logical and consistent, and I rather like him.

I am very straightforward, Iain. When I say that you are acting hypocritically, it is because I believe you are acting hypocritically, not because you linked to Charles Crawford.

I have contempt for your view that it is wrong for political opponents to do something, but OK for your friend Nadine Dorries to do the same thing. I have invited you to expound on your defence of Dorries and explain why what Dorries did was morally better than what you (rightly) condemned Margaret Moran for.

Oh, and of course I don’t mean that you smell by calling you a stinking hypocrite. The use of metaphors from smell to describe particularly evident bad behaviour is ancient. As in Shakespeare’s Claudius:

“Oh, my offence is rank. It smells to Heaven!”

.

One of the things I really do miss about the privileged existence I gave up, is the National Liberal Club. Seated with a book in a deep leather armchair by a roaring fire on a cold day, you could watch the shades of Gladstone, Lloyd George and the young Churchill stroll by.

In the Gent’s there is a cartoon of Tory wit FE Smith. The caption informs us that he would saunter, after a good few drinks, from his law practice at the Middle Temple to the Commons, often stopping at the National Liberal Club to use the lavatory. Some members complained, and one day he was stopped in the foyer by the porter:

“Excuse me sir, you do realise this is a private members’ club?”

Smith looked around him and sniffed:

“A club? I didn’t realise it was a club as well!”

Anyway, I really miss the place. I was a member for well over twenty years but I can no longer afford the fees. But why I recall the NLC now, is that it was specifically built following the Reform Acts of 1867 and 1884, to provide accommodation for working class Liberal MPs who could not afford a second home in London.

Sadly the bedrooms were sold off a few years back to the Royal Horseguards hotel, but surely this is the way to go? Out of London MPs should be provided with the use of a small flat in a dedicated block at public expense. That, their salary and travel to their constituency should be all they are given. I can see no evidence to suggest that the quite excessive office and staff budgets they have nowadays, have done anything to increase the quality of government.

Nadine Dorries, Tory MP, has admitted she claimed her constituency home as her “Second home” for the purposes of claiming vast expenses. So where was her first home? In the Cotswolds, apparently.

Astonishingly, Nadine admits deliberately concealing from her constituents that she did not live either in her constituency or near Parliament.

Nadine Dorries says:

I never wanted my constituents to think that I had another prime responsibility other than Bedfordshire and Parliament; maybe I should have been more open.

http://blog.dorries.org/Blogs/2009/May/16#16

How her constituents will react to being deliberately duped is an interesting question.

So what Nadine is doing is just the same as Margaret Moran is doing. Nadine is basing her claims on having two residences, one of which is neither in the constituency, nor in London. In each case, which they choose to claim on is based on which will bring in more money.

Now to Iain Dale. I already pointed out that in the case of flipping by cheap far right propagandist Michael Gove MP, Dale and other Tory bloggers suddenly had different standards to when they were dealing with identical troughing by New Labour.

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2009/05/the_breathtakin.html#comments

Iain Dale waxed furious over the “Shamelessness” of Margaret Moran. He fumed that her second home was

100 miles from her constituency and nowhere near Westminster.

Now then, Nadine Dorries’ first home is

100 miles from her constituency and nowhere near Westminster.

thus allowing her to put in huge claims on her constituency home.

So presumably Iain Dale regards Nadine Dorries as shameless, yes?

No. Because she is a Tory, and a mate of his.

I don’t condemn Nadine because unlike you I know the full details of her living arrangements and they fully comply with the rules, as she will be making clear in a further post.

https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=6214838&postID=2915940623081992628

(11.57 pm at 15 May on this comments stream).

Sickening, isn’t it? What a mighty blogging champion Iain Dale is! When it comes to New Labour, the tired formula of “Within the rules” is not good eonugh. But for his Tory friends, it is a complete exculpation.

Come on Iain, please give us a full explanation of exactly why it is fine for Nadine to do her job from the Cotswolds, 100 miles from both London and her constituency, while the taxpayer funds her large, plush constituency home.

You know, I obviously got it very wrong. I should have been Ambassador in Tashkent from a main Residence in Cannes. That would have been much more comfortable.

Tory blogs had become very popular as showing opposition to a rightly very unpopular governemt. But what the stupid, stupid, stupid thousand times hypocrite Dale shows is that the Tories are just the same kind of tribal predators as New Labour, simply itching for their turn to get their snouts in the trough.

Dale’s credibility as a blogger has been entirely compromised by his support for the Nadine Dorries scam. Actually, he’s only a Tory version of Michael White, with a thin veneer of good nature stretched over the hard party man.

Another Tory blogger, “Dizzy Thinks”, wrote a piece entitled “The Breathtaking Idiocy of Craig Murray”. Note that typically of a Tory, he knows so little of the Celtic nations that he can’t actually spell “Craig”.

http://dizzythinks.net/2009/05/breathtaking-idiocy-of-criag-murray.html

He also was attempting to defend the troughing of Tory MPs from my attack, and he decided the best way to do this was to attack me for being, as far as I can make out from his rant, a trendy environmentalist. He included this remarkable passage on his own virtues:

“I don’t eat organic food, nor drive a Prius. I have a 4×4 and love battery farmed eggs because they’re cheap.”

Which rather makes my point about Tory bloggers. Needled into showing their true colours.

There you have it officially from Dizzy. If you support the squandering of hydrocarbons as fast as possible, and keeping hens in 8inch by 8inch cages, then you probably should indeed vote Tory. If not, don’t vote Tory becuase you will be putting people like Dale and Dizzy in power.

Britain’s most disgusting journalist, New Labour creep and Jack Straw cheerleader Michael White, is on Sky News trying to justify his New Labour chums. He has just let us know that a middle ranking minister, a “Good Chap”, has told him that he was actively encouraged to put in a claim he knew to be ineligible, by the Fees Office.

That information comes from two sources both of which I trust not at all – White and a New Labour minister. He then went on to imply that New Labour MPs are contrite and have learnt their lesson “Unlike Sir Anthony Steen”, and then wound up by warning of the danger that all this fuss will let the BNP in.

White has gone on to say that the Brits are always angry about something, and a poll has shown us to be “the angriest people in Europe”. He then said it was all parties, not just New Labour, called Cameron “Hysterical”, and rattled off the names of four MPs whose cases he thought were “Serious”, all of them Tory.

Why this odious New Labour creep is allowed so much airtime for his government propaganda hidden behind a thin veil of hearty good nature, I do not know. It is bad enough that he gets to bully everyone on the Guardian who criticises New Labour. White is Associate Editor of the Guardian and he regularly hints to other journalists that his friend the City Minister, Lord Myners, Chairman of the Guardian Media Group, will be most unhappy with their anti New Labour stories.

White is the most disgusting reptile in the British media, which is saying a lot. He is on a salary of £182,000 at the Guardian, incidentally.

Gordon Brown will not leave Downing St until the last permitted date, which is June 2010, and then will leave his fingernails in the carpet. It is no good petitioning him to resign.

It is becoming plain that all the political parties are clinging on to the speeding gravy train together and have reached a mutual agreement not to call for any of their number to resign as an MP, even if they give up the odd apointment.

This parliament has to go. We have to work with the unwritten constitution we have. The only person who can dissolve a parliament is the Queen.

The UK constitution constantly evolves. There is no recent precedent for the current total loss of public confidence in parliament. The constitution now needs to evolve to cope with the age of new media. Such a request if strongly supported would become an important political fact in itself.

This is not about whether or not you are a monarchist. (I am not). This is about channeling the unfocused public anger with Parliament into action.

http://www.gopetition.co.uk/online/27778.html

(The language of the petition is respectful towards the Queen but not traditional. There is no language which would suit all shades of opinion on the monarchy. I know the Queen personally, enough to know she is not going to be insulted).

We are increasingly hearing the argument from our MPs that if you pay rubbish, you will get rubbish.

There are two problems with that argument. The first is that Nadira and Cameron yesterday left the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, where the nurses and midwives are indeed paid rubbish, but were still absolutely brilliant.

They were motivated by something alien to so many of our MPs, a genuine care for people. They were also, for the most part, a standing rebuke to UKIP, BNP and others who knock immigrants and the role they play in our society.

The second and clinching argument is that our MPs have been looking after themselves extremely well, but they are for the most part of abysmal quality. (The same could be said of our top bankers).

In fact, the reverse of the argument is true. If you make it a gravy train, you get people who are primarily interested in gravy. Like Malik and Moran.

I was reminded forcibly on this when writing my recent post about Michael Foot. I noted that his biography of Byron, The Politics of Paradise, is one of my favourite books. He sat in a Parliament which contained scholars of the highest order. Enoch Powell, Robert Rhodes James, Roy Jenkins, Tony Crosland and Michael Foot are only some of the politicians of that generation who wrote books which retain academic authority. (Don’t choke. Powell was arguably the World’s leading authority on Herodotus).

In the current parliament I can only think of lowbrow effusions. Brown’s curious ghost-written monographs “On courage” are, I think, meant to point up his own courage in overcoming his (genuine) misfortunes. Michael Gove’s mad Melanie Phillips style anti-Islamic rants are astonishingly ill-researched and of no academic use except as a study in prejudice.

In fact for the vast majority of MP’s, it is hard to imagine them reading a book. let alone writing one.

That is a map of Argyll and Bute constituency taken from Wikipedia. It is huge, and as you might imagine communications around it are pretty difficult. It contains at least a dozen different inhabited islands.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argyll_and_Bute_(UK_Parliament_constituency)

In a straight line it is about 150 miles from its northernmost to southernmost point. As is obvious, you can’t actually travel around it in straight lines without a helicopter.

Yet those purblind London oriented fools at the Telegraph think it is a scandal that the MP, Alan Reid, claimed £1500 on bed and breakfast within his own constituency. That would be four days stay for Hazel Belars in the Clerkenwell Hotel, but it was in fact Alan reid putting in the hard miles needed to be a good MP in his wonderful constituency – which makes the best whiskies in the world.

The real scandal here is the purblind stupidity of the English idiots of the Telegraph, who thinks that North means Islington and West means Chelsea.