Sleaze in Chichester and Dover

Guido has been doing great things in pushing the Giles Chichester sleaze story to the top of the news agenda, and it looks as though one of GC's colleagues will be following shortly.

There's an almost deafening silence from the other parties, which a cynic like me takes to mean that they're all at it. Gordon Brown did have this to say about his own MEPs though:

He said Labour MEPs had "insisted since 2000 on their being separate validated audits of their own expenses and they have a separate register about family employment".

What we should note about this is that none of these arrangements would have picked up the scam that Giles Chichester seems to have been operating. An audit would have noted valid invoices from a service provider company. Tick. The register of family employment would have correctly shown that he didn't employ any family members (they were employed by the service provider company, right?).

This is a classic case of saying something that looks like a denial, but which on closer inspection, isn't anything of the sort.