You Can Have All The Information You Want - Except That

There was no U-turn yesterday by the Government on MP Expenses, just an adjustment of policy.

Freedom of Information

Campaigners were yesterday celebrating a 'victory for people power' after a web protest about the Government's planned exclusion of MPs expenses from the Freedom of Information Act (FOI) effectively caused the Government to take the proposal off the agenda. Conservatives, who inwardly shuddered at the potential scrutiny, jumped on the bandwagon and accused ministers of a 'U-turn' and the Liberal Democrats 'celebrated' by calling it an 'humiliating climbdown'.

MPs were due to vote on Thursday to exempt their expenses from the FOI and Labour had instructed its MPs to vote it through while Tories and Lib Dems had been ordered to oppose it.

The National Interest

"It's a blow for National Security and gives Terrorists the upper hand," remarked a source close the Government. "Now any Fanatic can get hold of an MPs expense information and bomb their favourite expensive restaurant, daub paint viciously on their second or third home and even see which country they have spent the most on visiting in the last year. It's a disgrace."

"I don't know what those traitorous finks in the opposition parties are smiling about," continued the source, "Now any idiot will be able to see where they have taken their wives on party 'Information Gathering' trips, if they have a spare car for their girlfriends or what underwear they bought for their secretaries to wear in the office. They'll be the ones who are sorry, you know."

"Gordon is furious," said the source, who declined to be named as we lunched at La Caprice. "I mean this is what we are forced to do - justify ourselves by having cheap meals like the proles. He had cross party agreement, you know, and now the lilly-livered opposition leaders have bowed to popular press opinion and the bloody Internet protests - you would not catch Labour cow-tailing it to public opinion. No way. They are a disgrace to Politics. We all justified ourselves when we got our seats in the House of Whoopee and made sure we could have lavish offices, a fine retinue of good looking staff or family members being paid £50,000 for some research even when they weren't there, claim extortionate mileage of gas-guzzling vehicles and be exempt from Congestion Charge that Red Ken stupidly brought in, travel First Class as often as possible and for the dearly beloved and missed Former Leader Who Should Not Be Named, in Gordon's presence, to commandeer the Royal Flight to shuttle MPs back and fore from Brussels."

"And now we are threatened on the Second Home scam. That interfering High Court Judge (we know where he lives you know - he can expect an expose on his private habits even if we have to make them up) ruled the second home allowance should be made transparent. I mean that would mean dear former leaders would have had to reveal they had no mortgage on their home in their constituency but were claiming the same as an allowance. It's a brilliant scam - of course while claiming the allowance we never give back any of the bunce when we sell it as that's all ours. Just a shame those damn Americans blew the whole finance scam by not covering up sub-prime and took away the property bonanza. It really all is a tragedy, you know, and it's the public we are thinking of - they just can't cope with the information and may leap to wrong conclusions like there has been a systematic abuse of public money by MPs for years. How stupid and damaging would that be? People may even start not believing us when we tell them Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction primed for use on our Sovereign Territory. Then where would we be?"

The source went onto applaud his colleague Harriet Harman. "Superwoman, as we like to affectionately call her, is absolutely right. If MPs had to publish expenses retrospectively, then there would have been a 'blizzard of information at great expense'. I mean obviously she means that there should have been a blizzard but most of us have 'mistakenly shredded' them. Anyway, the public have no interest in MP expenses - we have told them there is nothing to hide and they believe every word our glorious leaders say and if they don't we we have an expensive sham public enquiry that we pre-load the answers to anyway."

"Know this, it is the job of Government to decide what is the Public Interest and how much they should know and expenses are vital for proper Government, just ask Lord Mandelson," remarked the source before going to meet a 'Trade Delegation of Ladyboys from Thailand' at a private room in an unspecified hotel.

Campaigners for the Freedom of Information have pointed out that the whole point of publishing MP expenses retrospectively would be to produce a 'blizzard of information' to justify to the public that MPs are spending sensibly and are not abusing power.