MPs and dishonesty - oh not again!

Last night, for instance, the Conservative Party chairman, Caroline Spelman, admitted using her MP's parliamentary allowance for payments to her children's former nanny, Tina Haines.

And although the furtive Ms Spelman said that the money, paid in 1997 and 1998, was for secretarial work the nanny did, the only 'secretarial' work Ms Haines remembers doing is that occasionally she posted letters and once or twice a week she'd get the odd phone call from other MPs. She said, 'Mr Hague (the then Conservative leader) rang a couple of times and obviously I took messages if he rang and passed them on.'

And the rest of the time, presumably, apart from taking the odd message (since Ms Spelman could not afford an answering machine), Ms Haines was sitting around watching 'The Jeremy Kyle Show' like all nannies do.

And this weekend whilst Labour MPs talk about how old habits die hard in the Conservative Party, all that the Shadow Chancellor, George Osborne has said so far is that Ms Spelman has 'enormous integrity and honesty' and that the Conservative Party is more transparent than Labour.

Is that lame or what?

Come on, Georgie, you've gotta do better than that mate!

In the light of the recent palaver about MPs' expenses - coupled with this revelation that the chairman of your party can, at the best, mislead or, at the worst, fraud the tax payer - doesn't that speak volumes about how lightly politicians view cases of parliamentary dishonesty?

Why should we vote for any of you guys when it's clear that all that politicians care about is looking after number one?