£120k a year but still he moans about paying rent

AS THE man responsible for upholding standards in the House of Lords, John Buttifant Sewel is paid more than £120,000 a year.

But the bumper salary and expenses package received by the peer i s apparently still not enough to fund his expensive tastes and extravagant social life.

In the secretly recorded footage, the 69-year-old peer can be heard moaning about his financial difficulties in between snorting lines of cocaine in the company of the two £200-a-night call girls.

He tells the two women how he strug - gles to pay the £1,000-a-month rent on the Dolphin Square flat where he hosted his sex party – in spite of receiving a generous taxpayer-funded allowance from the Lords.

As chairman of committees in the Lords, Sewel is paid a salary of £84,525 for the part-time work . On top of that, as he lives outside London, he claims £36,000 a year to maintain a home in London.

He can also claim up to £300 a day in attendance allowances.

And despite his complaints about the £1,000 rent of his Dolphin Square flat, it comes with a ‘protected’ rate which dramatically reduces what he has to pay . A similar flat in Dolphin Square costs almost £3,000 per month to rent.

Speaking to the women about his daily attendance allowance of £300 while opening a packet of white powder, Sewel mistakenly moans that is £200 a day. He says: ‘I know it sounds incredible, I know…’

One of the women asks, seemingly bemused at the amount: ‘£200 a day? £200 a day to buy lunch?’

Sewel replies: ‘It ’s not lunch luvvie darling, it’s paying for this.’

Sewel, who lives in Aberdeen with his third wife, Lady Jennifer , stays in the Dolphin Square flat when he is attending the House of Lords. He moaned: ‘When the House is sitting, three days a week, I get an allowance of £200.

‘Out of that it sits for about 120 days a year. So that’s £24,000, isn’t it? So it’s only £600 a week. You’re living on £50 a day.’

One of the call girls then asks if his rent is paid for him. Sewel reportedly says: ‘No, I pay for it out of my allowance. I don’t have to provide any receipts or anything for the £200. The fact I turn up means I get £200 a day . I could spend it on whatever I want to. I do spend it on wine and different things.’

And while writing out a cheque for £200 to pay one of the prostitutes, he moaned about the fact that his rent was going up this year.

‘When I took on this place they pro - tected the rents,’ he is reported to have said. ‘It’s been something like ten years it was reduced when market rent has shot up. So rather than £1,000 it ’s going to be £1,400. Then it becomes impossible.’

Before being made chairman of com - mittee he was allowed to claim for over - night stays, daily subsistence, office costs and travel expenses. Between 2001 to 2010 he claimed £403,799 in total.

After the rules were changed in 2010 following the MPs’ expenses scandal, Sewel was regularly among the highest claimants. In the first three months of the new allowance system in 2010 he claimed £24,000 – £5,000 more than the next highest-claiming peer.

‘I don’t have to provide receipts’