According to Smith and McNulty, MPs, not taxpayers, are the victims of the expenses scandal

You have to admire the magnificent, brazen, blank-faced nerve of Jacqui Smith – the former Home Secretary who could not be entirely sure where her home was. Appearing on Question Time on Thursday, her demeanour flitted between confected contrition and self-righteous indignation – always, at the end of every sentence, coming to rest on the latter. Jacqui, you will recall, claimed that her second home was her proper four-bedroomed family home in her constituency, Redditch, and that her main home was a room rented in her sister’s house. She did this in order to get more money from the taxpayer – as a consequence she was required to apologise to the House of Commons (not to you or me, from where the money came), but not told to pay a single penny back, or suffer any other form of censure. Sporting a new hair colour (Midnight Auburn, by L’Oreal, I think – because you’re worth it, Jacqui. No, you really are. The taxpayers have probably paid for that too – we’d better check the receipts) she smirked her way through questions about her expenses claims and twice deliberately misled the public. First when she suggested that the House of Commons authorities had accepted that she spent more time in London than in Redditch – they didn’t, they were very clear that she spent many more nights in her proper home in Redditch between 2007-2009 – of course she spent more “time” in London, it’s where she worked. And secondly when she implied that the taxpayers hadn’t lost out on her arrangement – we did, because she couldn’t have claimed at all on her sister’s house, so we lost out to the tune of about £30,000.