By James Browne
And so Jim “my face is my fortune” Devine has been found guilty of ripping off the taxpayer two counts of fiddling his parliamentary expenses.
The jury at Southwark crown court found that the former Labour MP for Livingston made false claims for stationery and cleaning services totalling £8,385 of our money.
But the former psychiatric nurse, union convener and campaign manager for Robin Cook will no doubt walk with his head held high after being cleared on a third charge of false accounting relating to £360 for yet more cleaning. (How much cleaning do you need? Could his lawyers not have come up with an insanity defence based around obsessive compulsive disorder.)
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The inappropriately-surnamed Devine was granted bail and will be sentenced in four weeks. In an intriguing indication of the state of affairs at Westminster, Devine’s lawyer asked that his client should not be held to a higher standard of honesty just because he was an MP. The depressing thing here is not that an ex-MP has been convicted of such venal dishonesty but rather that so many other denizens of the Houses of Westminster have not. I do hope Devine’s lawyers will not pursue me through the courts for saying this, but he’s no the sharpest sgian-dubh in the sock. That’s why he was caught. His fiddling was outside the rules of the game, while so many other honourable members trousered so much more legitimately.We need your support. Please donate to The Caledonian Mercury
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