Now that was quick.

[TheBigotBasher]

Caroline Spelman, helps to keep piggy snouts in the trough..

Colour me impressed. Guido Fawkes has yet again spiked the stupid press and looks as though he may have claimed his first scalp of the new Liberal Democrat and Conservative Party Government, the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Caroline Spelman.


He certainly has found what could amount to a real scandal.

He reveals:-

Spelman spent her days before becoming an MP in the agri-business, with a lobbying focus mainly on sugar beet, one of the most heavily subsidised crops in Europe. She was the Sugar Beet Commodity Secretary for the NFU in the early eighties before becoming Deputy Director of the International Confederation of European Beet Growers. Seemingly well connected in the field, Caroline and her husband Mark went on to set up “Spelman, Cormack & Associates” in 1989 as a food and bio-technology lobbying company.

For over ten years the new Secretary of State, along with her husband, lobbied the very department she now runs. Caroline resigned as a director less than a year ago and conveniently transferred her share of the company to her husband. The company address was also changed from her constituency home, for which Spelman claimed around £40,000 on expenses for cleaning and bills, to their million pound London flat. According to the company accounts last year, no rent was paid on this “office” subsidised by the taxpayers.

Not quite the Bernie Ecclestone level of scandal but certainly more interesting than the complaint that giving MP's the power to dissolve Parliament for the first time in history is somehow undemocratic

[muriel_volestrangler]

1. Fawkes was beaten to it by Farmers' Weekly. And The Guardian. And Greenwise Business

http://www.fwi.co.uk/Articles/2010/05/12/121212/Caroline-Spelman-confirmed-as-environment-secretary.htm
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/may/13/coalition-environment-ministers
http://www.greenwisebusiness.co.uk/news/caroline-spelman-gets-defra-top-job-1403.aspx

Looks like Fawkes just reprinted that. He's added that the company didn't pay rent; but that appears to be the flat which they name as their primary residence (ie they don't claim expenses on it), so it's reasonable for the husband to use it as his business address.

[TheBigotBasher]

2. All of those articles are puff pieces though.

I like politicians of all favours getting scalped.

[Hopeless Romantic]

3. "The Sunlight Centre" are onto it

http://us1.campaign-archive.com/?u=9c5e3ec87a9216c0fd1980d3a&id=c7ecac5564

[muriel_volestrangler]

4. Well, yes - they are a Guido Fawkes group

He founded them: http://www.sunlight-cops.org.uk/about/

[T_i_B]

5. I'll take the exact same view of Dildo Fawkes as I did before...

i.e. that he's even sleazier then the people he talks about and that any story from his poxy blog is false until proved otherwise.

[non sociopath skin]

6. I have a healthy scepticism of all bloggers of whatever kidney because ....

a) They are self-selected - and often rather arrogant with it. To misquote Churchill, "Immodest men with much to be modest about".
b) They seem to take each other a lot more seriously than the rest of us do.
c) Too many blogs are semi-colon and colon free zones, a real turn-off for we Grammar Nazis.:evilgrin:

The Skin