A thank-you to the people of Mid Bedfordshire.

Pat yourselves on the backs for a job well done. If people get the government they deserve then it must also be true that they get the quality of representation they deserve, and that can be the only justification for the 28,815 complete twunts who re-elected god whisperer, serial expenses apologist and occupier of a first class seat on the Westminster Gravy Express, Nadine bloody Dorries. The ink was barely dry on the election result headlines when the topic of Parliamentary expenses reared its head again, and specifically it was Nadine Dorries' payments of public money to her mates that time. This is kind of a post script in that last month the sum being mentioned was

...more than £40,000 in expenses for services provided by Marketing Management (Midlands), owned by her friend Lynn Elson. They live near each other in the Cotswolds.

Now it's being reported that it's actually in excess of £51,000 and living "near each other" means, well, it seems to mean this:

Mrs Elson’s company, Marketing Management (Midlands) Ltd, is based in her house in a small village in the Cotswolds. Accounts filed in August 2009 showed it had assets worth £4,527.
The house is yards away from a tiny lodge-keeper’s cottage that Mrs Dorries tells the Parliamentary authorities is her “main home” for expenses purposes.

I'd love to know more about that arrangement. Does Dorries own the cottage or does she rent it from her mate, and if the latter what sort of rate are we talking about and can that be verified? You see, a suspicious person, and with the kind of abuses that were going on until the expenses scandal broke last year (Were? More on that in a moment.) I'd say everyone should be suspicious, a suspicious person might wonder if a person might be charging another person a peppercorn rent if the second person was in a position to put a certain amount of "work" the way of the first person. And let's be blunt, you can buy a receipt book down the local Post Office providing it hasn't closed down - it doesn't mean money's changed hands. Am I saying Nadine Dorries has this sort of arrangement? Nope, but I am saying that the question should be asked. I'd hope that she owns the cottage since -

The unusual arrangement allows the MP to claim thousands of pounds in “second home” allowances for her much larger constituency farmhouse.

- and so ought to be saving enough on furnishing her actual home to be able to afford the mortgage on the cottage. Not exactly the idea of the whole second home payments thing.

MPs are entitled to claim up to £17,500 a year to cover the cost of a second home “required for the performance of the Member’s parliamentary functions”.
Most have a constituency house and a flat in London. Mrs Dorries’s designated “main home”, however, is 90 miles from Parliament and 55 miles from her constituency.
MPs are supposed to designate as their second home the property where they stay least often. Neighbours have previously alleged that Mrs Dorries spent most of her time at her constituency house.

Still, if she's spent the bunce on buying the cottage rather than pocketing it and pouring more at her mate it would leave only the question of whether she's overly generous to her friends and family with taxpayers money for the quality of service they provide. If she's always getting the best for the job then there's no problem with her hiring her daughters and paying her mates for marketing, is there? If not...

And talking of which, what really caught my attention is that Nads didn't slow down much after the scandal was all over the headlines.

New figures released by the Parliamentary authorities yesterday showed Mrs Dorries claimed £17,825 to pay Mrs Elson’s marketing company between July and December last year.

The fucking expenses scandal was still rolling on in the latter half of last year what with people being charged and announcing their intention to stand down at the next election in order to spend more time with their wallets, and throughout the period Nads was still chucking money at her mate. She'd better have been damned good, except of course the Mid Beds mob voted Nads back in anyway so by the time 2015 rolls around the issue of whether Nad's mate was damned good or not will almost certainly have been forgotten.

In the meantime Nadine gets another five years doing... whatever it is that she's doing (my bold).

Mrs Dorries was yesterday elected to the Commons Health Select Committee. She sat on the Science and Technology Committee between October 2009 and May 2010. According to a report on its website she did not attend any of its sittings.

Nice work if you don't have to actually turn up and fucking do it. Do you see, Mid Bedfordshire? This is what you have voted for, a representative who over seven or eight months attended preceisely zero sittings of an important committee, but who has managed to get an awful lot of money out of the expenses system that until we know otherwise we just have to hope was well spent. If that's all you demand of your representative in Parliament then good luck to you, but forgive me if I suspect that Mid Bedfordshire might be one of those areas where there are enough tribalist voters that the quality of the candidate is infinitely less important than the colour of the rosette. Be honest, some of you would have voted for fucking Chairman Mao if he'd come knocking on the door and introduced himself as your Conservative candidate, wouldn't you?

A spokesman for Mrs Dorries said she did not wish to comment.

I can't imagine why.