MPs as ‘cabs for hire’: sleaze, lies and lobbying

With trust in politicians already at an all time low after the MP expenses scandal and the election due to be announced any day now, could the row over cash-for-influence be the final act for George Brown and the Labour Government?

Here’s ITN’s report of the scandal…

Tomorrow night at the Frontline we host a special event with Dispatches investigative journalist Antony Barnett. This will be a rare chance to delve deeper into the story and ask where this leaves Labour and the state of our parliament. Click here to book.

But how does this compare to previous political scandals? Here we raid the archives to take a look back at previous Westminster media storms…

In October 1994 The Guardian revealed how Tory minister Neil Hamilton and another Minister Tim Smith had received money in brown envelopes in exchange for asking questions for Mohamad Al-Fayed in the House of Commons. 

During the MP expense scandal of 2009, it was revealed that Labour home secretary Jacqui Smith’s husband had used taxpayers’ money to watch a porn film.

And does anyone remembers these prophetic words from Tony Blair back in the new dawn of 1997…

We do, as a new Government, have to be extremely careful after 18 years in opposition. A lot of people who worked for us, they then go on and work for the lobby firms. I think we have to be very careful with people fluttering around the new Government, trying to make all sorts of claims of influence, that we are purer than pure, that people understand that we will not have any truck with anything that is improper in any shape or form at all…

They were altogether more innocent times…