"Venom In The Tea Room"

[Hopeless Romantic]

"At least we're all united now," one Labour MP told me in the committee corridor just before a stormy meeting of the Parliamentary Labour Party meeting in Committee Room 14. "United against Gordon."
Another furious Labour MP told me: "I've never known such venom as there was in the tea room this afternoon." Venom, it seems, partly directed at expenses hit man Sir Thomas Legg and partly against the PM.

Another Labour MP who claims to have connections with No. 10 insiders, claims that on Sunday, realising the Legg process was about to heap more humiliation on him, Gordon Brown was "having a Nokia moment".

During an hour-long PLP meeting, the mood was - according to the official briefing from Downing Street sources - one of "frustration". Really? I'd suggest another F-word: fury.

I've never seen such angry and gloomy faces as Labour MPs, ministers and peers file out of the PLP as I did this evening.

They'd just heard Gordon Brown admit: "It has been a difficult time, a difficult day and difficult letters are on the way." But he also told his MPs: "Legg was set up on an all-party basis."
Er, hold on? Up to a point, Prime Minister. My recollection - and that of most MPs - is that back in May/June the Prime Minister was worried about David Cameron appearing tough on expenses and wanted to appear tougher, so he proposed the Legg process.

Well, it has backfired on him spectacularly. I was gobsmacked when I heard he was being asked to pay back as much as £12,415.10p for claims for cleaning, gardening and decorating.

So too, I can confirm, was the Cameron high command over in the Tory leader's office. So too, most MPs. "I only had to pay back £6,000," the now-disgraced former Tory MP Derek Conway told me. Indeed.
Shortly before the PLP got underway up in the committee corridor, downstairs in the Members' Lobby there was a vast, unseemly scrum as MPs lurched forward to grasp their Legg letter from their pigeon holes in the corner.

How we laughed! "Predators!" sneered one Labour MP who has been in more than his fare share of scrapes in recent months.

"It's like waiting for your A-level results," said a tall Tory MP from the shires, cheerily. "I suppose some of us will be taken into the Whips' Office and handed a revolver."
As the afternoon dragged on before the Legg letters arrived, one MP said to me: "Have you noticed how some MPs who normally ignore all the mail in their pigeon hole with disdain are suddenly checking it every 10 minutes?"

And then it was upstairs to the Press Gallery to gloat... sorry, listen to... Jacqui Smith's apology to the House over her expenses.

Apology? Her whole statement was timed by the technical boffins here in the Sky News Westminster office at 1 min 59 sec. Under two minutes.

Flanked by members of the New Labour 1997 intake sisterhood, led by Caroline Flint, it was not only brief, but mealy-mouthed. "Was there a tear in her eye there?" asked a lobby doyen as we filed out of the Press Gallery. I didn't see one.

If you get time, rather than just skim through the Standards and Privileges Committee report, look at Parliamentary Commissioner John Lyon's report to the committee and see how he had to battle to get to the truth about how many nights she stayed at her family's Redditch home and in her sister's spare room in south London.

He had to fight to get hold of police records and information from inside the Home Office about her whereabouts.

And the result when he finally did? "The police figures differed significantly from the diary evidence," he told the committee.

No doubt Jacqui Smith is one of those MPs who was in a venomous mood in the tea room.

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