Political

Richard Benyon: did he break the rules on Parliamentary funds?

Following a tip-off from a constituent of Richard Benyon, Conservative MP for Newbury, I took a look at his website, which states:

This site is the responsibility of Richard Benyon MP and is paid for from his Communications Allowance.

Richard Benyon Website Footer

The Communications Allowance is one of the pots of public money MPs are given to help them do their jobs and therefore it comes with various restrictions, including (to put it simply) not using it for party political campaigning.

So I took a look at the site’s blog to see whether it kept to the rules. Or rather, I tried to look at the blog that is built in to the site, but the blog has been removed from the site:

Richard Benyon's Removed Blog

Not only are all the blog posts gone, but if you look on the right you will see a menu item entry about the blog (third down) that also no longer appears on other pages of the site.

All a bit rum, but courtesy of Google’s cached copy of the blog we can see what used to be there on the blog, which appeared to only have started on 15 September this year. We find political knock-about such as the following:
Richand Beynon Deleted Blog Content

Last year’s conference season was electrifying for those interested in who is to run this country. Brown looked in fine fettle at the beginning of September. However, he underwhelmed in his conference speech which left it to David Cameron to see if the “clunking fist” could be bettered. The Conservatives pulled some headline grabbing policies out of the hat and Cameron made the speech of his life. Really quite exceptional both in his delivery (without any real notes) and in its content. The tables turned and have stayed that way with Tory wins in London, the local elections and some amazing by-elections.

All fairly standard political commentary you might think, but why should the taxpayer be funding a website to carry such content? It looks like a very straight-forward case of the rules over this funding having been broken. Given the blog has now been removed, it certainly looks as if Richard Benyon (or his staff) have now had the same thought.

UPDATE: This story has now been confirmed by the local newspaper, which reports that Richard Benyon was warned by the Parliamentary authorities.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

All comments and data you submit with them will be handled in line with the privacy and moderation policies.