Eric Illsley's positive porridge time!

The wife of disgraced Labour MP Eric Illsley says he's doing fine in jail. He's keeping his head down. She says, "The first few phone calls were slightly emotional obviously because it was a shock but he's keeping his head down and getting on with it. He seems chirpier now than the first few days. He'll cope. He's not always been an MP. Eric didn't come from the playing fields of Eton, he comes from the playing fields of Kendray (in Barnsley)... so he's quite resilient, he'll handle it well." Hold on a minute, dear! So you think public schoolboys are not up to a period in the slammer? Most of those who ever do find themselves on the wrong side of the law fit in perfectly well. It's the pretentious middle classes that don't fair so well.

Recent old Etonian lags have done quite well. Lord Brocket got knifed in jail, which gave him a rise in the pecking order on kudos. Jonathan Aitken has reformed himself from being a perjuror. Old Etonian Simon Mann found himself in a frightful jail in Equatorial Guinea after trying to get rid of the dictator. He is now working as an adviser to President Obiang  -  six years after trying to overthrow him. No doubt he told the despot it was all a terrible mistake.

Mrs Illsley may think the playing fields of Kendray will have given her husband a sense of coping but I think she's just trying to get her ten pence worth of class bitterness in. Eric will do far better if he comes out with his head held high, realising that he did wrong (which she tells us he does realise) and put his time and skills to good use.

Also Mrs Illsley should remember what Roger Cooper said almost 20 years ago when he was released from Ervin jail in Tehran. When questioned by eager tabloid journalists about his time at the hands of his Persian prison guards, he said, "Anyone who has been to a British public school can do five years in an Iranian jail."

Eating porridge is only the start!

Eric Illsley to leave Commons within the month

Eric Illsley is going to do the decent thing. He's resigning as an MP. Barnsley Central constituents won't need to be prison visitors unless of course they want to be.

What Illsley should have done was to step aside at the General Election. He knew then what he knows now. He pushed the bounds of political decency beyond a certain point. It's been said he just followed the system. In fact, he's on record as saying it was all seen as a pay top-up. In some ways the House of Commons is very much like a public school. All MPs who cravenly accepted the "fees" basis for getting a bit extra on the side are guilty of trying to run a secret system. They got found out. Illsley just took it a bit too far for the others to accept. He's guilty as charged, but is he any more morally wrong than the others?

David Cameron said last week that politics isn't always fair. No its not. And the way the expenses scandal has been handled that statement is very true. Some MPs got away with it (just paid it back), others got thrown out by fellow members they had never got on with, and some, like Illsley, end up as convicts. In some ways I feel a bit sorry for Eric Illsley. He forged a few documents in order to gain some extra cash. Others just presented original documents for things they never really needed. In reality, it was all some fantastical forgery, a con on the public. Just as at school, the ones that let the side down big time get the stick.

If only they had had the guts to present a proper pay structure that all could see.

Labour MP admits expenses fraud

Labour MP Eric Illsley has admitted he fraudulently claimed more than £20,000 in parliamentary expenses. Appearing at Southwark Crown Court, he admitted three charges of false accounting. This after he strenuously denied any wrongdoing. I get the impression that for quite a few MPs, the culture of shoving things down as expenses was a completely OK thing because they felt aggrieved at their "low pay". They should get real. Let them have proper salaries and proper expenses. Even now the whole remuneration system is creaking alongside mutterings and moanings.

No doubt Illsley will do time. Will his constituents have to become prison visitors if they want to see him or will there be a by-election? We should all be told!