And so the truth is out at last. The long awaited declaration has been made. Aproximately Six Hundred And Fifty Expense Fiddlers are being forced to hand over on average around £1800 of ill gotten gains, making the total sum that the person appointed by the fiddlers SAYS says has been fiddled a cool £1.1 million.

Fiddling small change these days, I have to admit, and perhaps a sign of the times that this gang of criminals are so incompetent they cannot carry off even half as much as Ronnie Biggs and his pals who netted £2.6 million which was, it seems, a damned sight more than hollywood made from the movie celebrating these rogues.

But wait. That is not the end of these revelations. For the net gain to the taxpayer  of these refunds is ... NIL. In fact it is worse than nil. For the total cost of the process by which these liars and cheats have been brought to book exceeds by an undisclosed margin  the amount that has been repaid.

Which, you will pardon me for saying, suggests that there was bugger all point in going this far. It would have sufficed to say that every lying cheating one of the occupants of SW1A 0AA would have been sacked for theft, fraud, or some other act of gross dishonesty in the REAL world

But of course this is not the end of the story. News reaches me that Lembit "Weather Girl or Cheeky Girl" Opik, the man who scuppered the chances of making history by making Labour a thing of the past in the Welsh Assembly when he buggered off with his cheeky girlfriend instead of attending the meeting that would have sealed the alliance against Rhodri Morgan, Lembit is apparently appealing against the ruling that he has to repay a £900 mbile phone bill

And while people like him carry on in that vein, failing utterly to understand that until he and his chums are treated in exactly the same way asevery small businessman in the country, and are forced to abide by the same rules on allowable expensdes that the tax man imposes on us, he and the rest of the thieving scum will never understand why we the electorate wouldn;t piss on any of them if they were on fire.

One thought does occur to me though. The days of mobile phone contracts being £25 a month just for the connection, and 25p a minute outside the M25, 33p a minute inside and a total cost of £1.25 for someone to call a mobile from a BT landline, find you are not there and leave an answerphone message of thirty seconds duration and then for the mobile phone owner to retrieve it ended in 1994 when Orange brought in airtime bundles and I and millions of others dumped our cellnet and vodaphones in favour of a company whose slogan would not go down well in the Irish Republic.

So, given that these days that £25 buys you a phone a contract and enough bundled minutes to cure Alzheimers, who in the name of God could Lembit have been calling to rack up a bill three times that? Or did his cheeky girlfriend give him her premium rate get-laid-tonite-dot-com number to ring for a private session ?