After 2009's deluge of horrific stories about MPs and others' peculation and other dubious practices, we expect honourable behaviour from those who set themselves up to rule over us. However....a miscellany of press reports is tracked below: we invite readers to post links to new ones in the forum. Hover over links for article titles.

23 July 2010: The Telegraph reported under the title "Tory donor lobbied Government to cancel £80m loan to rival firm" that the Government was coming under increased pressure to publish full details of the decision to halt the loan to Sheffield Forgemasters, which was agreed under Labour to protect jobs. Only weeks earlier, Tory donor Andrew Cook had written an email to Mark Prisk, the business Minister, claiming it was "probably unnecessary and possibly illegal under EU rules". He also stressed that he had been "the largest donor to the Conservative Party in Yorkshire" since Mr Cameron became Tory leader in 2005, added the Telegraph.

16 July 2010: The Guardian reported that Conservative peer Lord Taylor of Warwick is to face prosecution on six charges of false accounting after alleged misconduct over expenses, the Crown Prosecution Service has said. Taylor is due to appear before City of Westminster magistrates on 13 August.

30 May 2010: The Telegraph reported that Danny Alexander, who was appointed the previous Saturday after the resignation of fellow Liberal Democrat David Laws, designated a property as his second home for the purpose of claiming parliamentary expenses but described it to HM Revenue and Customs as his main home. "Mr Alexander admitted that he took advantage of a loophole to legally avoid paying CGT on the sale of the south London property for £300,000 in June 2007."

30 May 2010: The Sunday Times reports that the chairman of the JCB construction equipment firm, one of the biggest donors to the Conservative party, had his nomination for a peerage rejected by the House of Lords Appointments Commission after the tax authorities failed to support it. Shortly before the list was published Bamford withdrew his name, the paper adds.

29 May 2010: The Times reports that David Laws (Liberal Democrat, Yeovil), Chief Secretary to the Treasury, has apologised for claiming more than £40,000 in parliamentary expenses for renting rooms in properties owned by his partner James Lundie, who works for a lobbying firm and with whom he has been in a relationship since 2001. Mr Laws said he would pay back the money and referred himself to the Commons standards watchdog. Mr Laws said that he had acted not to “maximise profit” but to protect his privacy and that of his partner. Mr. Laws' website notes that he is Surrey born and went to St. George’s College, Weybridge. After Cambridge he worked as an investment banker at JP Morgan and Barclays de Zoete Wedd, before leaving the city to become economic adviser to the Liberal Democrats in 1994. See also The Daily Telegraph. PS: Laws resigned later today.

4 April 2010: The Sunday Times reports that a UKIP MEP, and Lord Pearson of Rannoch, the party’s leader, told undercover reporters how a real donor's name could be kept secret by passing tens of thousands of pounds through intermediaries. The paper reports also that Pearson told the undercover reporter that 'some UKIP members were neanderthals' and described his colleague as 'one of our only really sane MEPs.' The article is worth reading in full. Last November, the Daily Telegraph maintained that Pearson, a strident critic of waste of public money in the EU, "claimed more than £100,000 in publicly-funded expenses on the basis that his £3.7 million house in London was his second home while also owning a 12,000-acre estate with servants in Scotland."

28 March 2010: The Guardian reports two more former Labour ministers in the 'cabs for hire' parliamentary lobbying scandal being secretly taped offering to use their government contacts to help commercial clients, in return for fees of up to £2,500 a day. Adam Ingram, the former armed forces minister, and former sports minister, Richard Caborn, both to stand down as an MPs. The latter told the interviewer he might soon be entering the Lords, where he would have a new network of inside information. Comment: senior civil servants are probibited from employment in any spherewhere their public office might be exploitable for two years after leaving the service. Not so with the 'public servants' at the House of Commons.

21 - 23 March 2010: political sleaze on all sides just goes on and on. Scarcely have the scandals over the Conservative's Michael Ashcroft been driven from the front pages when among many others The Guardian reports that three former Labour Cabinet Ministers, Geoff Hoon, Stephen Byers and Patricia Hewitt have been suspended from the Labour party fuelled by 'backbench revulsion' at claims that the trio had been using their ministerial experience to seek profitable lobbying consultancies. A Channel 4 programme secretly recorded them offering to lobby for up to £5,000 a day. Byers, the former cabinet minister, described himself as a "cab for hire". Margaret Moran, Labour MP for Luton South, was also been suspended.

14 March 2010: the Sunday Times reports that big Labour donor v faces allegations of “cash for favours.” Willie Haughey has given £1m to Labour. "A Sunday Times investigation has identified public sector contracts and awards of millions of pounds of public money for Haughey’s companies," says the paper.

2 March 2010: The Guardian reports that the Tories refused to answer accusations that Lord Ashcroft had breached the promise he made to become resident and pay full tax as a condition of his ennoblement in 2000 – or reveal when the party leadership first learned that the peer, who has donated millions to the Conservative Party, had hung on to his non-dom status. The Guardian put seven key questions to Tory central office who refused to answer any of them. You will be interested in the simple and plain chronology under the subhead: "When an assurance is not what it seems". See also The Times, and The Independent which adds comment from the Tories who claimed that Labour had taken more than £10m since 2001 from eight non-doms, including Lord Paul who was made a Privy Councillor last summer, and the Liberal Democrats also accepted nearly £3.5m from non-doms, while unsurprisingly the Telegraph is more muted.
Lord Ashcroft's own statement is here. On his website he states: "If home is where the heart is, then Belize is my home."
Later today, The Times added comment on another Tory peer, Lord Laidlaw of Rothiemay, who in 2007 took extended leave of absence after it emerged that he had failed to keep a promise to become a UK tax resident but remained in tax exile in Monaco. The Times notes: "Lord Laidlaw, a colourful figure who admitted to sex addiction after being caught in a Monaco hotel room with four prostitutes and a male gigolo in an April 2008 sting by the News of the World, ranked number 100 on the Sunday Times rich list in 2007. He was nominated as a potential life peer by Iain Duncan-Smith in 2004."

Domiciled status in UK is no guarantee that an individual will pay tax to contribute their share to the nation's infrastructure: in 2007 at least 400 UK-based individuals earned £10m a year, but only 65 paid income tax, according to the figures obtained under the Freedom of Information Act (This is Money/Evening Standard)..

10 Feb 2010: The Times reports that David Cameron’s ex-adviser Andrew Mackay MP, who fell foul of the expenses scandal, has joined a large public affairs and lobbying firm two days after the Tory leader said that lobbying was "the next big scandal waiting to happen." Earlier Times reports: 26 Sep 2009 and 25 Sep 2009 indicate that up to thirty candidates for selection as Conservative MPs have been recruited by lobby firms (Comment: we would expect Labour MPs or candidates to have been similarly approached too - but the bookies' money is on Labour losing office at the next General Election)

8 Feb 2010: A senior Scotland Yard officer was today jailed for four years for threatening and falsely arresting a man in a petty row over money. Commander Ali Dizaei was guilty of a "grave breach of public trust" said the judge. Times report

6 Feb 2010: The Telegraph reports on a Tory MP who hid extra spending money down her bra as one of five politicians who agreed to be filmed living with families on council estates. The Telegraph report adds: "As one of hundreds of MPs embroiled in the expenses scandal, the backbench Tory tries to persuade her host, who lives on benefits, that it is tough to survive on a politician's wage. " Comment: In 2008/2009, Ms Dorries was paid £158,530 expenses on top of her MP's 2009 salary of ££64,766 (source: They Work For You).

14 Jan 2010: The Telegraph reports that John Nash, the chairman of Care UK (one of the biggest private health providers to the NHS) gave £21,000 to fund Shadow Health Secretary Andrew Lansley’s personal office in November. The Telegraph adds that: "Mr Nash, a private equity tycoon, also manages several other businesses providing services to the NHS and stands to be one of the biggest beneficiaries of Conservative policies to increase the use of private health providers...... However, there have previously been concerns over potential conflicts of interest from the Conservatives’ funding arrangements. Alan Duncan, the then Energy spokesman, was heavily criticised after it emerged that his private office was being funded by Ian Taylor, the chairman of Vitol, a firm of oil traders. The private office of George Osborne, the Shadow Chancellor, is funded by the hedge-fund bosses Michael Hintze of CQS and Hugh Sloane of Sloane Robinson."

Party spokesmen say that they have been transparent about these donations, registered with the parliamentary register as well as with the Electoral Commission, and within the rules.

10 Jan 2010: The Sunday Times reports that the Conservative party hid donations of £40,000 from Zac Goldsmith, his brother Ben and two billionaire brothers in an apparent breach of the law. The donations were recorded on official records as coming from Unicorn Administration, an intermediary company that helps run the finances of the super-rich. But The Sunday Times discovered that in fact they came from Zac Goldsmith, his brother Ben, and Ben’s wife Kate, a member of the Rothschild family. Another donation of £14,390 came from the Reuben brothers, property developers. (Comment: and - owners of the company that set out to end the Olde Harrow pub in Thames Ditton, who a year or two ago were reported by the Financial Times as having made multiple donations to the Tories through various companies, each of a size just below the threshold of £50,000 then being proposed as a reasonable maximum by David Cameron.) .
The Tory party admitted to the Sunday Times that it had 'made administrative errors'.