But now the culture of wrongdoing is so advanced, you can’t even claim back less than half of the money you spent, without having a political opponent say you’ve falsified the record and must be challenged in court.Ms Jones should have had an excuse prepared. Fiddles and “creative accounting” used to be a joke (“In Reading she was Charlotte/ The pick of all the bunch/ But down on his expenses/ She was petrol, oil and lunch”) and employers sometimes indulged a little moral trimming among their executives. She didn’t indulge a taste for nasal sherbert under the heading of “research materials”. All she did was overspend her own cash on party banners, stickers, hired cars, petrol and toner for the photostat machine; she was, as far as we can tell, simply guilty of being an over-zealous campaigner who finds she’s exceeded the legal limit for expenses by 105 per cent, panics and tries to conceal the evidence.But life is hard in Expenses Land. But it wasn’t an expenses fiddle as you or I might have once understood the concept. There was no freebie ride to Morocco or lingering candlelit supper a deux in the Adulterer’s Rest Hotel, courtesy of the taxpayer.

We’re not talking designer frocks charged to a bogus “clothing allowance”. That faraway look of purse-lipped disbelief she wore after the court’s decision – as of someone who, while watching her courtesy car being ritually crushed by the Serjeant-at-Arms is told that her pet hamster has been found dead in the microwave oven – spoke paragraphs.
What did she do wrong? She made a false return on her campaign expenses. If they’d flogged her naked through the streets of Newark and put her in a ducking stool on the edge of town, she couldn’t feel much worse than she does now. To be sentenced to 100 hours of “community service” – the modem equivalent of being put in the stocks – must seem a galling irony to a woman who has represented her community for nearly two years. To have lost (pending appeal) your seat in the Commons, your pounds 45,000 MP’s salary, your agent (who was fined pounds 750 for his part in her downfall), the respect of your constituents, the doe-like loving gaze of your leader, and any shred of sympathy from your political peers is a tough break. POOR FIONA Jones, MP and now suddenly former MP It’s hard not to feel sympathy for her. These home-owners cannot provide for the refugees for more than two days.”.

“Considering the number of people who are here and those still coming, I don’t think there will be enough food. Every house contains at least 10 new guests.”Conditions are very bad. We don’t have running water or electricity, so there is a risk of diseases,” said Jusuf Dobra of the Mother Teresa aid agency. More than 500 people are crammed into one school building, while 120 families are camped in another. “For them it is important to open the main road.” But for the rebels, he said, the main concern was to evacuate civilians safely from the war zone.Whether Glogovac counts as a safe place remains to be seen. One bridge had been destroyed in the fighting, another was mined and a third was slightly damaged by explosives.