Barbara Follett: the denial that reads rather like an admission

Crikey, this is bizarre, so let’s take things one by one in the controversy over Barbara Follett.

1. Ken Follett (husband of Barbara Follett, Labour MP and Equality Minister) tells Andrew Marr’s Sunday AM program that, “She [Barbara Follett] spends all of her allowances and all of her salary running her office and I actually subsidise it to the tune of at least a hundred thousand pounds a year.”

2. The Huntsman blog posts saying that (a) these subsidies need to be declared under the law, and (b) there’s no record of any such declarations.

3. Barbara Follett responds with a statement, exclusively published by Pink News, which states: “There are no donations involved”. Ah, that sounds nice and clear: no money from husband going to her office.

But wait, she then goes on to say, “The funds are either from my parliamentary income, or from the joint accounts that I hold with my husband, Ken Follett. As most of the money in these joint accounts is earned by my husband he is quite correct to say that the taxpayer is not subsidising his lifestyle. In fact, it is the other way around.”

But the opposite of her office funds subsidising her husband is, er…, her husband subsidising her office funds. So doesn’t that mean she’s just said there really are donations after all? And doesn’t her husband know what’s going on with their joint bank accounts anyway?

All in all, not the most convincing or clear denial of wrong doing we’ve seen in the last couple of weeks.

UPDATE: As The Huntsman points out in the comments on Lib Dem Voice, he’s now posted a piece pointing out that on another occasion Barbara Follett issued a joint statement with her husband unequivocally stating that her work “is heavily subsidised by her husband” and “Ken subsidises her”. Now, a subsidy means the provision of money, which in turn means, er…, giving a donation, doesn’t it?