SNP snouts in the Westminster trough

AND still the SNP’s dyspeptic cohort of MPs don’t get it. They were despatched south amid proud boasts that this pious Nationalist band would have no truck with the bright lights and sinful distractions of Westminster. The dignified 56 were outriders for a new kind of politics, they told us.

Sadly, their first act was the old-style politics – bellying up to the subsidised bars.

Now we discover that not only are many of them employing relatives using taxpayers’ cash, astonishing overtime claims are being billed to the public.

Paul Monaghan, MP for Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross, put his constituency communications manager brother through for an astronomical 255.75 hours overtime – equivalent to more than seven solid weeks’ extra work.

Corri Wilson, MP for Ayr, Carrick and Cumnock, has employed at separate times her daughter and her son – the latter getting 118 hours overtime as he acted as caseworker and personal assistant.

None of this is illegal or even against House of Commons rules. But it comes after the exposure (by a fearless and free Press) of the scandal of moats and duck houses and ‘flipping’ of home addresses by MPs shamelessly milking a lax system.

While many MPs of other parties also have their grubby snouts in the trough in the same manner, it is the SNP’s hypocrisy that marks it out for special opprobrium from the public. Take East Lothian MP George Kerevan. He declared he would accept only £27,000 of his salary to stay in line with the average Scottish wage. His stance looked rather less principled when it emerged he paid his wife £20,000 of our cash to run his office.

The Nationalists in the Commons have the air of a bunch of obstreperous pupils behaving badly once out of earshot of their headmistress Nicola Sturgeon.

She was distracted in Holyrood yesterday, trying to portray an excoriating Audit Scotland report on the state of the NHS in Scotland as some sort of badge of pride. She tried to pin the blame on parties who held power a decade ago and claim that, hey, things are worse in England under the evil Tories.

None of that will come as any comfort to a single Scot needing treatment here.

So there is little prospect of internal discipline being applied to the SNP Westminster gang.

Nor, sadly for a public weary of paying to line MPs’ pockets, is there much prospect of the radical redrawing of the rules on expenses that is clearly and urgently required when the MP foxes are in charge of the hen coop.