Your Chickens Have Come Home To Roost, Boris.

Boris Johnson, Mayor of London receives a salary of £140,000 for carrying out his mayoral duties.

This pales into insignificance when you compare it to the Chief Executive of Kent County Council, Peter Gilroy’s salary of a pound short of £230,000 per annum, so the tax paying burghers of London are getting a good deal for their money.

Getting to the point, Mr Johnson writes a weekly column for the Daily Telegraph newspaper, for which they pay him £250,000 a year.

This is no second job scandal though, Boris claims that he is a fast writer and he dashes his column off on a Sunday morning. Fair enough, so it’s a lucrative hobby.

The scandal with this is, Mr Johnson dismisses this quarter of a million pound remuneration, rather cavalierly, as ‘chicken feed’.

For God’s sake, how many chickens can one man have?

When half of his electorate are on the bread line, shouldn’t he have chosen his words more carefully?

He does try to salve his conscience by saying “Of course, I make a substantial donation to charity”.

You and I know that donations to charity are offset against income tax, so in the real world this isn’t costing Boris a bean!

Good luck to him and long may he continue writing, but please Boris, try thinking before you speak next time!

The Pen Really Is Mightier Than The sword

The man who, in effect brought one of the world’s oldest parliamentary systems to its knees by arranging for leaked MPs' expenses details to be given to the Daily Telegraph has been named.

John Wick, a former SAS man, acted as a broker, passing the details from an anonymous source to the newspaper, a working demonstration of the pen being mightier than the sword.

On paper, most of these MPs have done nothing wrong, it’s the system that is wrong.

My local MP in Essex, for example, is as far as I know, squeaky clean compared to most of the others, his claims are within the spirit of what the expenses were intended for, but what he is allowed still appears to be wrong.

He lives in Surrey, around a 45 minute train journey from London or a 45 minute drive by car to his constituency.
He claims for a flat in his constituency, which is a 25 minute train journey from London and he also claims for a flat near Westminster.

It would appear to me that the average working man would find these travelling times to and from work every day a bit of a doddle, so why can’t MPs who live within striking distance of London commute like everyone else has to?

Hopefully, when the dust has cleared and the expenses have been overhauled, we will get right honourable ladies and gentlemen sitting in Parliament who are there because they want to represent us and not what they can get out of it.

Mr Wick, we salute you!

Paper (No Make That Electronic) Tiger

Rupert Murdoch’s company, News Corporation, is planning to charge a fee for access to their newspaper websites.

This means that you will have to pay to read the dailies such as the Times and the Sun and Sunday newspapers, the News of the World and the Sunday Times online.

This is prompted by soaring online subscription revenues at the Wall Street Journal and the fact that News Corp’s quarterly operating profits crashed by 47% to a meagre $755,000,000.
Ah bless, you can’t even get a decent meal for that nowadays, can you?

Has he contemplated the fact that there is a recession, and one of the first things to go is forking out for a newspaper every day?

Does Mr Murdoch and his team think that electronic newspapers share brand loyalty with the printed version?

Wake up Rupert, mate. This is the 21st century. If you start charging, readers will simply click on to the Daily Telegraph or the Daily Star and then, bang goes the advertising revenue from your websites!

Don’t forget, nearly every television company in the world have sites with news pages, some, even, with videos of the stories, and they don't charge to view them.

Remember what the Duke of Wellington said, “Publish and be damned”!