“You scratch my friend’s back…”

Typical! You wait ages for a story about a Baroness and then two come along (almost) at once. This time, it’s Baroness Uddin, whose brazen attempt to have her suspension from the Lords  lifted and use her attendance allowance to repay the wrongful expense claims for which it was imposed caused much amusement twelve years ago - has it really been that long? - and who was finally bailed out by four benefactors to the tune of £124,000.

Two of those donors represented the Islam Channel, a TV station with some rather dubious history and possible connections, and a third, it now turns out, was none other than Lord Alli, the Cabinet’s Universal Provider of Good Things and furnisher of designer duds and luxury accommodation to the Starmer ménage; he and the Baroness go back a long way, having both been elevated to the peerage (as Blair creations) on the same day back in 1998 and, by 2012, were clearly on “Here’s £62,000 to tide you over” terms.

Of course, it may simply have been that Lord Alli and the others couldn’t bear the sight of Baroness Uddin’s sad little face when the stern Lords of the Committee locked her out of Parliament but, given the amounts of money concerned, a cynic could surely be forgiven for looking at the fingers she has in various diplomatic and international pies and asking some awkward questions.

Fortunately for the Baroness, Keir Starmer as DPP, ruled ‘after careful scrutiny of the evidence’, that there was no criminal case to answer - despite the testimony of neighbours, household bills, Baroness Uddin’s own Facebook account, the electoral register and even her own husband and family that her claims were fraudulent - because ‘a senior parliamentary official ruled that a peer's "main house" might be a place they visit only once a month’ (presumably dating back to the time when being Lord so-and-so of Somewhere meant having a country seat with all the associate hereditary obligations rather than the transitory acquisitions of a life peer).

Leaving aside that, by that definition, I could claim to be permanently resident in the compost heap at the bottom of my garden, it all seems a little odd; it could be entirely coincidental that a close associate of Lord Alli’s was once let off a serious legal hook and restored to the political stage by Starmer on a technicality of startling flimsiness but, in the light of the nature and magnitude of the subsequent personal freebies since received from Lord Alli by the former DPP, surely we are now entitled to ask whether it’s not merely a case of quid pro quo but also quid ante quo.

In the light of past posts, it seems only fitting to finish with a reprise from ‘Expenses - the Musical’ (with apologies to the late, great Freddie Mercury)

She keeps a home down in Wapping,

Where subsidies help pay the rent,

A mansion in Bangladesh,

And don’t forget the flat in Kent,

Pressed for a remedy, she says she’s in penury, 

But once she’s back in Westminster then all will be fine;

Three hundred quid a day she’ll get,

She’ll use your cash to pay her debt

Extraordinarily nice!

She's Manzila Uddin, 

Baroness of Bethnal Green,

House of Lords expenses queen; 

Her arrant greed will blow your mind.