Barbara Follett's Folly

Lordy, lordy. It's difficult to know where to begin with the revelations about MPs that are now coming thick and fast from The Telegraph.

There is lots of comment elsewhere but I wanted to focus firstly on this particular vignette:

Barbara Follett, the multi-millionaire Tourism Minister, claimed for private security patrols outside her London home costing more than £25,000. The parliamentary fees office, which is supposed to monitor claims, warned Mrs Follett that her claims may appear "excessive" if made public, but she was not deterred, saying she felt unsafe in Soho after being mugged.

WTF!? She got mugged so the tax payer was forced to shell out more than the average UK salary to make her feel a bit safer!? I got mugged when I was a student. It was a horrible experience and I felt very unsafe walking around at night for years afterwards. I would have loved private security patrols around my house but of course I live on Planet Earth.

The claims for toilet seats and refurbishment of second homes are disgusting but at least they have some vague relevance to an MPs ability to live in 2 different homes (as an aside it is clear that they have massively taken the mickey on these and they will certainly deservedly lose this perk) but to get a taxpayer funded private police force because you were mugged? That is so far removed from the reality of everyday people that I would be amazed if Follett (who has a majority of 3,139) is not turfed out in 12 months. Her Stevenage constituency party would do well to deselect her before that.

Oh, and one final thing, her husband is a multi-millionaire author for whom £25,000 would have been nothing and yet she still sent us the bill.

UPDATE: ConstantlyFurious in the comments has suggested that there should actually be a by-election and has a blog post to this effect too. Her behaviour is so egregious here that it might become inevitable. Is that the Chiltern Hundreds I can hear a callin'...