Laws…out and down

And so it’s taken just the 3 weeks for the first scandal to hit the new Government following the resignation tonight of David Laws the Chief Secretary of the Treasury. He’s been caught fiddling more than £40,000 in expenses claiming for rent from the tax-payers’ purse paid to his long-term live-in lover James Lundie, who he claims is not really his partner because they have separate bank accounts. Ah somebody should presumably tell all those married people with personal accounts that their marriages are annulled then.  This guy is, er was, one of the ‘stars’ of the Lib-Dems and clearly a clever bloke  having been tasked by Cameron with leading the fight on reducing Ministerial overspending to help the new coalition Government meet its budget reduction targets. It’s reasonable to assume that he understands finance and fiscal propriety and yet most of today we were being asked to believe that this guy wasn’t breaking the clear Parliamentary rules about claiming expenses from spouses, family members and partners. Yeh right. And not only has he been knowingly doing this for years, this is the Minister who over the last week or so has been telling the country how to act with more fiscal responsibility.  How on earth do these people sleep at night?  

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Dynasty – it’s over

Well you know me, I hate to crow but deep down I like it when  a forecast comes true. I wrote about the end of the Ming dynasty following his  performance at the Lib Dem party conference. He looked old, irrelevant and just out of his time – the nearest thing to a dead man walking in the current political scene. See posting on 22 Sept. My only reservation was whether the young turks in the LD’s would have the ruthlessness to finish him off. Well with their usual decisiveness, it’s taken a month and  a postponed election to get them to administer the slow poison. Well he fell on his own sword tonight rather than  await his inevitable demise. This party will never learn how to appeal to a young dynamic audience will it? Is  it just me? Just call yourselves the  Mildly Angry Radicals. Ruthless ? More like hopeless.

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