Читать книгу Crap MPs - Dr. Grosvenor Bendor - Страница 14

(b.1953) Conservative, Shrewsbury & Atcham 1983–97, Old Bexley & Sidcup 2001–

Imagine that you are one of Derek Conway’s constituents. Plop onto the mat; Derek has sent you a Christmas card! And being from a senior Tory MP, it goes straight onto the mantelpiece. How nice of Derek to put his office staff on his Christmas card, you think. Perhaps he is thanking them for their hard work during the year. There’s that nice Colette, his secretary. Then you remember Frederick whom you met once, and who Derek said was his researcher. And there’s Henry next to him, apparently another researcher. You open the card: ‘Merry Christmas from the Conways!’

Many MPs employ members of their family, but few as brazenly as Conway. The Daily Telegraph reported that tax-payers paid members of Conway’s immediate family a total of more than £260,000 over a six-year period. However, it was found that Henry and Freddie were full-time students for some of the time they were employed, and the Commons Committee for Standards and Privileges began an investigation. In 2008, it concluded that Conway had ‘overpaid his younger son, Freddie’ and had ‘awarded him excessive bonuses’, despite the fact that he appeared to have been ‘all but invisible during the period of his employment’. The sums involved were eye-watering. Young Freddie ‘earned’ up to £11,773 a year, plus bonuses, for almost three years. In total, he was paid £45,163 in gross salary, in addition to picking up pension contributions of about £4,500, which isn’t bad considering he was meant to be studying geography at Newcastle University at the time. In 2009, the same committee found that Conway had also overpaid his son Henry. He was ordered to pay back thousands of pounds. Conway is standing down at the next election.