Government Defends Expenses Omission

The UK government last night defended its decision to omit legislation on reform of MPs expenses from yesterday’s Queen’s Speech.

A government spokesman said:

Well, we were hoping that if we kept quiet about it, everyone would have forgotten all about it and we could carry on as before. Frankly, some of our moats are in a right state now, and there has been talk of setting up a backbench committee to investigate the plight of homeless ducks. It is getting so bad that some MPs have had to resort to spending their own money on essential groceries in order to feed their mistre... Research Assistants.

Political commentators all agree that the government made a strategic mistake when they set up an inquiry into MPs expenses. Usually a government inquiry can carry on arsing about pretending to investigate its brief until everyone forgets all about it. Then when it issues its report no-one can remember what problem the report was supposed to resolve, or – in most cases – even why it was felt necessary to even set up an inquiry in the first place.

However, reform of MPs expenses will be a difficult problem for the government as it has been a long and honoured tradition amongst MPs to never pay for anything themselves, from classing their foreign holidays as ‘fact-finding missions, through employing members of their family as supposed office staff, despite those relatives not even knowing how to work a paper clip, through to sports, opera and theatre tickets received from ‘lobbyists’, it is a rare MP who has to put his hand in his own pocket, or even take it out of his ‘research assistant’s’ knickers, to pay for anything.

Speaking about the whole MPs expenses scandal, sources very, very close to The Dark Lord of Foy said (off the record):

Actually, sweetheart, we thought the public would have forgotten all about it by now. After all there has been a lot of Strictly Come Dancing on the telly since the whole expenses story started, now there is The X Factor too, and… well… with Christmas coming up and all that.

Usually the general public has the attention span of a lobotomised goldfish with learning difficulties. Therefore, we confidently expected the only ones to notice we’d ‘forgotten’ about MPs expenses reforms to be those political nerds everyone else finds it far too dull to listen to for more than a few seconds at a time.

So, if it wasn’t for those pesky kids in the opposition stirring it all up again, we would have got away with it. Drat, drat and double drat. And you can stop that sniggering, Milliband.