An MP’s protest at expenses coverage
NOW I’VE seen it all. The in-house magazine of a journalism union does not have the professionalism to call for a comment before publishing assertions about one of its own members.
Instead, rather than checking facts directly, it just does a clippings job and repeats inaccuracies.
In the current climate, it is one-way traffic against all MPs and everyone gets tarnished.
Sadly, the rule of thumb, too, is not to react — it just keeps the knocking copy going and encourages hostile missives on the local letters pages.
For the record, however, I am not an MP who “regularly makes the maximum £400 monthly claim for food” (nor do I have monthly parking permits — just one a year).
What has got lost in some of the ridiculous claims — from duck houses to mole hunts — in the coverage of the additional costs allowance, is that it is not simply there to help run a necessary second home.
It also caters for out-of-pocket expenses, which would be normally reclaimed from an employer in any other sphere.
In journalism, the staples would be lunches and taxis.
Unlike at newspapers, however, MPs cannot specifically claim the costs of working lunches or dinners, or hosting visitors, nor indeed late-night taxis after public transport finishes.
I have claimed reimbursement of costs of hosting visitors from the constituency, or to do with parliamentary work — food, as you call it — on relatively few occasions.
The most notable was one summer, before the annual Buckingham Palace garden parties, when the bill from the House of Commons threatened to scupper the family holiday.
I spend a lot of time in parliament, as a member of the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee, standing up for journalists.
So avaricious am I, too, that since 2001 I have paid my NUJ dues — for the most part at national newspaper rates — even though I do not still practise or gain any benefit.
The irony, of course, is that I may not have featured in your list — with its big question mark — if I had not still done so.
Sometimes, you wonder why you bother.
Paul Farrelly
MP for Newcastle-under-Lyme
The Journalist did indeed take the information from public sources — including searching for MPs’ protests and objections to the Telegraph’s revelations — lacking the means for a full investigation.