Three minutes ago I walked into the kitchen and turned on the radio where I caught the following information snippet from the Seven O Clock News on Radio 4

The annual cost of funding the parliamentary body set up to enforce the new rules on Parliamentary Expenditure is six times as much as the latest enquiry ordered be repaid.

We all know the latest enquiry - the one that invented limits and applied them retrospectively to the annoyamce of people like Lembit Opik who successfully appealed against the demand that he repay £900 in mobile phone bills actually cost more than the money it ordered to be repaid, and the enquiry before that deposited a bill of £400,000 on the taxpayer's doormat but did not bother to act to reposess a single duck house.

Now it seems recruiting a new full time head of this standards body at a cost of £100,000 and their full time staff of eighty or so will suck six million from the taxpayer.

I have still not heard a convinceing argument rom anyone as to why they do not simply force MP's to fight it out single handed with no legal help whatsoevever against a panel of Special Inland Revenue Commissioners before they are awarded the cost of a single postage stamp.

After all, that's what Gordon Brown has done to every small businessman since 1999. Sauce for the goose and all that.