They are all in it together. This morning’s papers lead with the story that Members’ Estimate Committee will challenge Sir Thomas Legg’s demands that MPs repay excessive expense claims, on the grounds that Sir Thomas’ has applied retrospective rules on maintenance grants. Many MPs will take legal action to avoid repayment. The pro-transparency MP John Mann told the Guardian:
“The Legg team have clearly got problems, because [MPs] don’t have the receipts for a lot of this stuff. Clearly, if someone has managed to get [a claim] signed off by the fees office then they have a case when asked to repay.
“There could be as many as 200 MPs who refuse to pay anything. If he is going to say to an MP, ‘You have to pay back £200,000’ and that MP is standing down, they are simply going to say ‘No way’.
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