The Spectator

Mr Gordon Brown, the Prime Minister, is to pay back £12,415.10p that he claimed in expenses between 2004 and 2008 Mr Gordon Brown, the Prime Minister, is to pay back £12,415.10p that he claimed in expenses between 2004 and 2008; he had received a letter, along with all other MPs, on the day Parliament returned from its summer recess, from Sir Thomas Legg, aged 74, a retired permanent secretary at the Lord Chancellor’s Department appointed by the Members Estimate Committee as an independent auditor. More than £10,000 of Mr Brown’s repayment relate to cleaning bills. Mr David Cameron, the leader of the opposition, was asked by Sir Thomas to explain why he had needed to repay £218.96p in interest on the mortgage on his constituency home in Oxfordshire.

It seems that marriage and success go together as surely as love and marriage. A new study by the Office for National Statistics suggests that married men are 33 per cent more likely to find another job after being sacked than men who are single or divorced. Given that unemployment is 2.47 million and rising, perhaps it’s time to chivvy the unemployed off to church. Marriage is, according to the study, a more important determinant in getting a job than having A levels, a degree or a mortgage. It is tempting to speculate about the reasons for this. Perhaps the prospect of staying indoors listening to the wife complain about mounting bills is enough to send even the laziest chap down to the job centre.

No sooner did parliament return than it was embroiled in the latest instalment of the expenses saga. The scandal is, by now, wearily familiar — but it has lost none of its capacity to shock. It is understandable that MPs feel aggrieved by the retrospective rules applied by Sir Thomas Legg on how much can be claimed for cleaners and gardeners. But arbitrary justice is better than none. The House of Commons has squandered its moral authority, and having honourable members forced to repay a little taxpayers’ money is the least of it. This week, we learned that Damian Green’s now notorious arrest was at the behest of a Cabinet Office official who claimed — dubiously — that the leaks posed a ‘considerable damage to national security’.

Invest in the state Sir: David Cameron will never be a revolutionary if he follows your advice and concentrates only on government spending (‘Is Cameron a revolutionary?’, 3 October). He needs to completely rethink taxation, too. You say that taxes must rise. But putting up taxes now, as conventional wisdom suggests, will increase the government deficit, not reduce it. Cameron should make massive cuts in taxes on personal incomes, savings and capital. Suppose he reduces taxes and at the same time allows individuals wishing to set up new schools to issue ‘education convertible bonds’ underwritten for the first ten years by the government? As long as these are made attractive to savers, individuals will have a reason to buy them.

Among austerity measures outlined by Mr George Osborne, the shadow chancellor of the exchequer, at the Conservative party conference in Manchester was that the pensionable age for men should rise to 66 no earlier than 2016, instead of by 2026. He also promised a one-year pay freeze for public-sector workers, apart from the million who earn less than £18,000. On the eve of his speech, Mr Alistair Darling, the Chancellor, came up with the wheeze of suddenly announcing that pay for people in the public sector such as GPs and judges would be frozen. The Conservatives also showed their seriousness in responding to the public deficit by banning overt consumption of champagne at their conference.