The General Election has led to a government comprising strange bedfellows with Conservatives and Liberal Democrats working side by side for as long as they can stand it. The coalition cabinet got off to a good start by cutting their own pay by five per cent. (Ninety-five per cent of a lot is still a lot of course, but the gesture was well received.)
A decision has been taken to scrap the former Labour government’s absurd and ruinously expensive Identity Cards scheme, and the new boys are grappling with ways of introducing electoral reform.
Prime Minister David Cameron is visiting Wales today. He has appointed a Welsh Secretary at Westminster: Tory MP Cheryl Gillan (pictured above). Mrs. Gillan was born in Cardiff and represents an English constituency. Recently she got herself in hot water in the expenses scandal.
Mrs. Gillan is said to have claimed for dog food, over-claimed for her gas bill, and employed her husband as ‘Office Manager/Researcher’. She charged for a second home even though main home in her constituency was on the London Underground network – and then she had the cheek to over-claim for the mortgage costs on it.
Thank you Mr. Cameron, I’m sure that she will be a great asset to Wales.
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SAT 29th MAY 2010 UPDATE: David Laws, Lib Dem MP for Yeovil and Chief Secretary to the Treasury in the new government’s cabinet, has resigned. This follows revelations in the Daily Telegraph that Mr. Laws had claimed tens of thousands of pounds in housing expenses for ‘renting rooms’ from a man with whom he was living in a homosexual relationship.
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