Their greed, our cash

IN devastating language, MPs name the guilty over the collapse of Carillion, a firm showered with public contracts up to the moment it went under.

Directors were too busy ‘stuffing their mouths with gold’ to run the firm properly, they say. Meanwhile, auditors KPMG were complicit in endorsing ‘ increasingly fantastical figures’, and regulators were ‘united in their feebleness and timidity.’

How much longer must taxpayers pick up bills for greed and incompetence before ministers act? BY just 12 votes, MPs yesterday saw off the latest attempt by over-mighty peers to run this country from the unelected Upper House, refusing for the second time to be browbeaten into reopening the £5.4million Leveson Inquiry. But we can’t go on like this. With peers seeking to overturn Brexit, we face a crisis that threatens to drag Britain back to the 18th century and destroy every last vestige of public faith in democracy. The Lords cannot survive in its present form.