DO AS I SAY...

When he was a trade union boss, Clive Brooke was a keen advocate of financial moderation. In a report he wrote with church leaders, he said people must show ‘a generous spirit, and not pursue economic advantage to the limit’.

But then Clive Brooke became Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe – and began filling in his expense forms. Over the past seven years he has been claiming close to the maximum allowance in overnight subsistence payments despite owning a £700,000 townhouse just three miles from Parliament. The Labour peer has made the claims – totalling more than £140,000 in the accounts available – on the basis that his main residence is a house in Brighton on which he and his wife Lorna, 66, have no mortgage. Lord Brooke, 67, and his wife have owned their three-storey London home, in Battersea, a seven-minute drive from Parliament, for 23 years and are on the electoral roll there.

Lord Brooke - a good old Trade Unionist - is symptomatic of a new breed of parasite introduced by Blair.