Oh dear. It seems that ‘honest John’ Swinney is embroiled in another fine mess, this time about taxpayer-funded election expenses at Holyrood. Strict rules state that MSPs are entitled to claim up to £5,500 per year for stationery, but it must be used only for parliamentary duties. Yet now one of the Scottish First Minister’s staffers has been caught joking about the ‘stamp fairy’ helping with campaigning. Probably not the best quip to make when Operation Branchform is still ongoing…
According to the Scottish parliament’s rules, stamps and other items bought with the allowance must explicitly not be deployed for any ‘party political purposes’. However the Times has this week published leaked WhatsApp messages in which one staff member of the cash-strapped SNP boasted that they had recently ‘inherited a lot – and I mean a lot – of second class stamps’. An individual in Swinney’s office replied: ‘The stamp fairy is very useful when it comes to campaigns.’
Holyrood authorities have now been forced to launch an inquiry into the possible misuse of parliamentary stationery, following a complaint which suggested that stamps had been passed to Westminster candidates to target voters. When challenged on Sunday over the claims, Swinney said he did not believe the SNP had misused stamps but declined to give an explicit guarantee that there had been no wrongdoing.
‘I’m confident of that,’ the First Minister said, when asked by the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg whether he was ‘completely sure’ that public money had not been used for the SNP election campaign. For his sake, Mr S hopes that he’s right…
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