It isn’t only MPs who are grabbing our money

The trousering of our money by most MPs pales beside the payoff to Glasgow City Council’s former head of education, Margaret Doran, whose redundancy package – despite only being in the job since 2007 – comes to a whopping £278,000.

According to the Evening Times, she was made redundant because her department was broken up. She’s unlikely to be too broken up herself. For who is her husband but Michael Connarty, Labour MP for Linlithgow and Falkirk? He has the distinction of having the second-highest set of expenses in the UK, a total of £183,466, including hundreds of pounds claimed for stereo equipment. Connarty’s reaction to being found out, apart from threatening to sue various newspapers, was to say, “Are we only allowed to buy things from the 99p store?”