My MP is very expensive!

I remember hearing Mark Jenkinson, back when he was just a candidate for election talking about MP sleaze and the gravy train of MP expenses. He was rightly outraged (or so it seemed) at the way that some of our nation’s elected parliamentarians were treating the public purse as though it was their personal magic money tree. If elected, Jenky assured us, he would never treat the taxpayer funded expenses pot like that.

Well… let’s see how sincere he was, shall we?

In his first year as an MP he ranked 20^th out of 650 MPs which means he claimed more than fully 630 of his peers. That’s quite high, weighing in at a whopping £61,197.82. The justification for this massive claim on the public purse was that he was a new MP, setting up a new office and he lives a long way from London. I have some sympathy with that. Setting up a new office is expensive – but lots of the new ‘red wall’ tories have had to do that and many of them live just as far from Westminster as Jenky does. And that’s before we consider the Scottish MPs, many of them are newly elected too and they all live further from Westminster so that doesn’t really wash.

But let’s not labour too much on the past. We’re another year on and surely, without a new office to set up Jenky’s expenses will be lower. Won’t they?

Newly released figures show that far from dropping down the rankings of high expense claimants, Mr. Jenkinson has risen from number 20 to number 6. His most recent figure is £35,164.16 in this financial year. And we’re only 4 months in. There’s less travel because of Covid and presumably no new office set up costs to include there so it’s interesting to note that over £17,000 has gone on office expenses.

And this is the guy who voted against feeding hungry kids last Christmas!

Follow the link in the description below if you’re interested in the not very specific details. It’s interesting reading, more by its lack of detail than by its clarity but hey ho – that’s MP expenses for you.

We see you, Mark Jenkinson MP. We see you!

https://www.parallelparliament.co.uk/mp/mark-jenkinson/expenses