THE WEEK THAT WAS….
The editorial team at the Daily Telegraph must be laughing all the way to bank after having the wit to buy the disc of MPs’ expenses for just £70,000. For the price of some maintenance work on one’s moat, a couple of home cinema systems and a nice portico, the Telegraph has led every news programme for the past eight days. It’s the sort of saturation exposure normally only in the gift of totalitarian dictators.
Local MPs have, for the most, escaped serious criticism, although the sizeable joint incomes of the First Minister and his wife (both MLAs and MPs) have featured and Lady Hermon, the UUCNF’s only MP, has paid back an erroneous, innocent claim (although it’s probably going to be the UUCNF leader looking for the most payback given that the pink tinged Lady has finally trashed the UUP’s Tory link-up).
Sinn Fein was accused by the Sunday Telegraph of paying above the market rate for London apartments, but after 30-years of the ‘Armed Struggle’ the implication that the party may be ripping off the British state is hardly going to upset the rank and file (maybe the new strategy is a ballot box in one hand a bill receipt in the other?).
With the media feeding frenzy over the golden trough that is the Westminster Fees Office, there wasn’t, unfortunately, much attention on local politics. There was a deplorable petrol bomb attack on a Sinn Fein MLA’s home, but everyone was too polite to notice that the party which used not to believe in the “politics of condemnation” was justifiably quick to call upon dissident Republican groups to do just that.
Two Ministers complained about the tardiness of the Executive in clearing anything, but the lack of inaction there at least allows the parties to get on with their own policy documents. The DUP wants to take the axe to the body politic, culling bodies and slashing MLAs down to just 72 or 54, while the SDLP recently launched a budget paper (the source of much mirth during Tuesday’s economy debate).
Important stuff, but with their penchant to change addresses more often than the Chancellor changes growth predictions, those “flipping” MPs have taken all the limelight.
