Question time

A letter from the Huntingdon Constituency Conservative Association inviting me to a special general meeting where Jonathan Djanogly will take questions over his expenses. The date is July 9 and since I shall be at work I shall have to forgo the pleasure of an evening train ride to Huntingdon - actually a packed and sweaty sardine special from King's Cross - and a walk to the high street and the Commemoration Hall. But I should think quite a few people will go.

Mr Djanogly has claimed £5,000 for stout gates at his house. Fair enough. He wants to keep out those Huntingdon Life Sciences troublemakers not presently detained at her majesty's pleasure. He claimed for a few other things too but, as with all other MPs in trouble on this issue, it is the small items that cause the difficulty. In Mr Djanogly's case, he claimed for equipment to make jam, £47 in total. I may have given a lower figure in an earlier post and apologise for misleading my reader.

He is a wealthy man from a wealthy background, the son of noted philanthropists (who must be, or ought to be, deeply ashamed) and so my question would be phrased thus: "Mr Djanogly, could you explain to us not why you claimed for jam-making equipment, but why you thought it seemly to do so?"

Jam-making equipment would not help him to represent his constituents, though maybe it was for some enterprise to do with his role as a shadow business spokesman. If the jam was to be sold at a constituency shindig, then the claim surely amounts to laundering taxpayers' money into the constituency coffers. If he flutters his hands and says an aide submitted the claim without his knowing anything about it well, honestly, the oldest trick in the book. If there is just obfuscation and dissembling - because, of course, there is no sense in which it could possibly be seemly to claim for such trifles when your constituents are in no position to do so - then those present will conclude that he has displayed a total lack of judgment, doesn't know right from wrong.

The next step would be to consider whether they want someone with such poor or absent judgment as their MP, and since I no longer live in the constituency I leave it to them to decide, though I know what I'd do with him. I expect he'll be all right, but there will have to be some serious grovelling and begging for forgiveness in front of those who do turn out on Thursday week. The best he can hope for is to draw a line under it, begin to move on. After all, here is a man who had every expectation of a ministerial career. He has only been an opposition MP, and mostly a pipsqueak backbencher, never heard of from one term to the next. Can Mr Cameron elevate him in future? Possibly I suppose, but those pots of jam have left a nasty mark on his reputation.

Meanwhile, Sir Compton will shrug his shoulders, tut tut a bit and hope for better. We certainly deserve better.

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In the same subject area, Nick Robinson did a talk on the wireless at 1.30pm today about the expenses crises. He interviewed Will "Thirsty" Lewis, asbestos-coated editor of The Daily Telegraph. I have been fiercely critical of him in the past, hating all the horrible things he has presided over at the once-greatest-newspaper-in-the-world, but overall the DT did right to break the story, even if there were some unfairnesses in the way they did it. Mr Thirsty is right to say that this rotten, fetid parliament needs cleaning out, and cleaned out is what it will be. The real eye-popping thing though was the revelation of a 45-minute phone call from Gordy McDebt to Will, during which the caller was quite unrestrained. That's a great one for the memoirs.