THE curious case of a luxurious £1,124 bed that travelled from Glasgow to London has uncovered a bizarre expenses pact that was brokered by two Labour MPs when they shared a second home in the capital.
For a year Michael Connarty MP and Ian Davidson MP shared a London flat, provoking comparisons to "The Odd Couple" played by Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau. While there they brokered an expenses agreement that saw furniture being ferried across the c
ountry courtesy of the Westminster allowances system.
Scotland on Sunday can reveal that Connarty claimed a £1,124 bed on his expenses, which was delivered to the Glasgow flat of his friend and colleague Davidson.
The peculiar arrangement was part of an agreement that was reached between the two politicians when Connarty was Davidson's tenant in London.
Instead of him paying Davidson rent, it was decided that Connarty should put furniture bought by his politician landlord on his Commons' expenses.
Connarty defended his use of taxpayers' money saying that he did not think that his MP's salary of £64,000 was "a lot of money".
"I do not agree with the argument that I'm a better MP than you, because I'm a cheaper MP. I've been 17-years an MP and I've worked my butt off. At the end of the day I don't think that £64,000 is a lot of money.
"I don't do it for the money (but] I want to live at least comfortably."
The complex arrangement saw Davidson buy the bed, a £1,099 plasma television and a £250 CD radio alarm clock for the flat.
Connarty then claimed the items that Davidson bought on his expenses and wrote his landlord a cheque for the money when he had been reimbursed by the Commons.
Connarty's cheques were taken by Davidson as a payment for letting him stay in his London flat.
Last night Connarty said Davidson, the MP for Glasgow South West, had bought the bed for his own use and had it sent round to his Glasgow flat so that he could then drive it down to London to install it in the flat.
The bed that Connarty slept in while they shared the flat in London had also been bought in Scotland.
Connarty, the MP for Linlithgow and Falkirk East, spent £1,114 on the bed and bed frame that he bought in Falkirk and had delivered to his constituency home there before Davidson took it down to London.
Connarty claimed the second bed on his expenses, but did not hand that money over to Davidson because he took it with him when he eventually moved out of the London flat.
Connarty also claimed for two sofas, which cost more than £600 each and were delivered to his Falkirk address. He then paid Davidson for one of the sofas out of the money that he had been reimbursed.
Davidson picked up the items from Connarty's Falkirk house and drove them down to London in a van that he had hired.
Last night Davidson said: "I told him 'I'm taking stuff down to London. We will get it delivered to my house and taken down to the London house we were sharing'. We did this, because if you ever try and get stuff delivered to London, you don't know when it is going to arrive.
"I got the stuff, hired a van, picked the stuff up from my house in Glasgow and picked up stuff from Mike's house (in Falkirk] and drove it down to London."
Connarty stayed with Davidson from October 2006 until November 2007. As well as paying for Davidson's furniture, he paid three months of his mortgage – a sum that he also claimed from his Commons' expenses.
Both MPs said the deal had been cleared by the Fees Office, the Commons' authority responsible for expenses.
When Connarty moved into another flat that he has bought in London, he took the "Falkirk" bed and one of the sofas with him as well as kitchen equipment such as pots and pans that he had claimed but not paid Davidson for.
Last night Connarty said: "The agreement was that I would share the mortgage. He didn't charge me rent. I paid three months (of the mortgage]. He didn't claim when I put the mortgage in. But he claimed the rest of it (the remaining nine months].
"The rest of the time, he asked by arrangement that I would put through these claims for things he had bought to furnish the flat.
"It does not seem to me to be an odd arrangement. It seemed perfectly reasonable that I should buy some furnishings for a flat I was living in, if, in fact, I was not paying for a flat of my own."
Connarty added: "I did (this] with prior agreement with the person in the finance department."
Both Connarty and Davidson claimed that the arrangement would have cost the taxpayer more if Connarty had rented a place on his own.
Connarty said: "I probably claimed less in that year then I have ever claimed before or after. Because on that claim was around £2,500 for the mortgage and then furnishings."
Davidson added: "All that was put in writing to the Fees Office – both of us – and it was agreed. They knew everything that was being done. We discussed this with the House of Commons authorities. It was perfectly clear to them that it would have cost much more for Mike to have gone into rented accommodation for a year. There was a net saving for the taxpayer."
Meanwhile, it emerged yesterday that the Conservative MP Bernard Jenkin claimed £50,000 on his expenses to rent his sister-in-law's farmhouse, just over the road from a home part-owned by his wife.
Jenkin, a former Tory deputy chairman, has been allowed until this August to pay his wife's older sister Mary Fraser, who lives at Moniack Castle near Inverness, using his second home allowance.
The arrangement was allowed even though a recent Commons rule change states MPs must not use family members as landlords.
Jenkin, MP for North Essex, is married to Anne Jenkin, a PR consultant who is a former girlfriend of Richard Curtis, the screenwriter.
Jenkin and his wife live in Kennington, south London. But he nominates a substantial Essex farmhouse as his second home which is owned by Fraser.
On the other side of the road from the farmhouse is a country house, whose registered owners are Anne Jenkin and Mary Fraser. Their mother lives in the country house.
It also emerged yesterday that Paul Goggins, the Northern Ireland minister, allows the director of a leading charity to live rent-free at his London home, which is financed by the taxpayer.
Goggins shares the house in south-east London with Chris Bain, who is the director of the Catholic aid charity Cafod and a friend since university. The two men have lived together for 11-years. For the last three years, Goggins, the MP for Wythenshawe and Sale East, has designated the London property as his second home and claimed almost £45,000 in expenses for it.
The full article contains 1208 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
