Julie's on to a nice little earner

She's back! Julie Kirkbride, former MP and occasional muse of this column, is looking for a tenant for her Worcestershire mansion flat at £925pcm - yep, that's right; the one where we subsidised the £50,000 extension and the £500 bedroom curtains.

By coincidence, the Times today reports on the EU decree that 'tourism is a human right' and that the taxpayer should subsidise foreign holidays for those too poor to afford it.

'The scheme, which could cost hundreds of millions of pounds a year, is intended to promote a sense of pride in European culture, bridge the north-south divide in the continent and prop up resorts in their off-season.

Officials have envisaged sending south Europeans to Manchester and Liverpool on a tour of “archeological and industrial sites” such as closed factories and power plants. The idea is based on a project in Spain in which holidays in the winter off-season are subsidised by the government.'

Well, if they fancy Bromsgrove instead, there's a flat already available, substantially extended with taxpayers' money; surely the state should be entitled to use it for free every now and then. In fact, there are houses in constituencies all over the country paid for, at least in part, by us.

So why not fill them with southern Europeans in search of culture? I'm sure we could develop a pro-rata system - we paid for your guest room so we're putting a couple of Greeks in there for a week next Thursday, OK?

Another Song of Kirkbride

(Perhaps a little late with this one, but then again she did spend £500 of our money buying curtains for her son's bedroom)

Bless you Julie Kirkbride
Wherever you may be;
You’ll soon be stepping down with your other half
So no more fiddle-dee-dee.

Lucky Julie Kirkbride,
Although you’re going grey
You’re the archetype of the busy young mum,
Or so your apologists say.

So you and Andrew split the bill
While he played the system with consummate skill
You both claimed for second homes until
The day
He gave it away.

Canny Julie Kirkbride,
Your brother came to stay;
So you built him a room for fifty grand
And got the voters to pay.

You’ve expressed no shame for playing the game
And you’ve put the blame in your husband’s name
But the way you claim ignorance sounds lame
To me
For a gal who sits in the House
As Bromsgrove’s own MP.

Weasel Words in Bromsgrove

Today's Fun Quiz...

Word goes round the office that X is moving 'to accomodate her growing family'. Do you:

a) Ignore it - it only means they'll be sending round another bloody envelope?

b) Congratulate X on the impending arrival of a second child?

or

c) Assume it means that her free-loading 59-year-old brother wants his own room?

Well, exactly! What were the Fees Office to think when a woman who has already, in the best 'having it all' tradition, produced one child as an MP sends them this letter?

"The extended mortgage was taken out to pay for the building of an extra bedroom at our property, accommodating the needs of our growing family.
I trust this is all in order."

What she actually meant, of course, was, "The flat is big enough for us and our son but we want an extra £50,000 extension on expenses to accommodate my brother, who helps out with a spot of babysitting at weekends", but it's not obvious, is it?

The use of the stock phrase 'growing family', if not a deliberate attempt to mislead, is at the very least open to some ambiguity when applied to a woman of child-bearing age with an eight-year-old son. It hardly suggests that her home requires an extra room to house an adult relative of independent means.

After all, this is an 'honourable member' - if the fees office draw the not unreasonable conclusion that she is pregnant, they are hardly going to ask her for proof, are they? (That treatment is reserved for the rest of us proles, like the young woman recently refused NHS dental treatment despite abundant evidence of her condition - H/T Ambush Predator)

Whether she intended to mislead or not, the implication was there, particularly in her insistence that they would have to move to a bigger house if the extra money was not forthcoming, and could have influenced the decision of the Fees Office. This is the final straw in her already damaged credibility and has convinced me, at least, that she has to go.

Update: She has just announced she will step down. This has been touted as a blow against working mothers - but then how many working mothers expect the state to subsidise live-in childcare?

'A Bromsgrovian's Lament' or 'The Song of Kirkbride'

(With apologies to John Betjeman - or for those of a musical persuasion, The Song of the Clyde)

Ms Julie Kirkbride, Ms Julie Kirkbride,
You're in real trouble, it can't be denied;
There are some things the voters find hard to forgive
Like the fact that you don't seem to know where you live.

In your box room your brother lives five years rent-free,
Claims a grand’s worth of gadgets on a fun high-tech spree;
It’s of course a coincidence, no more or less,
That his IT firm's based at the selfsame address.

As what of your sister, who pockets twelve grand
Of taxpayers’ money for lending a hand
When your secretary’s absent? That’s pretty good pay
For odd jobs done two hundred miles away.

So put up your hands and admit to the way
You’ve exploited the system and made us all pay;
Now the scandal is out there is nowhere to hide,
They won’t rest till you’re history, Ms Julie Kirkbride.

For an interesting and varied collection of comments on this issue, see Iain Dale's Diary 27/5 'In Defence of Julie Kirkbride'.