This story has got legs

My mum's up in arms about her local MP, Ben Chapman, being the latest to get embroiled in the expenses debacle. She's particularly affronted that his office in New Ferry looks so scruffy when it turns out he owns a £300k house.

I may have mentioned this before but my mum's mum was a lifelong Tory voter, probably the only one living in the same working class area as she did in South Liverpool. Her reasoning was simple: Labour MPs were skint so were only MPs to see what they could get for themselves. Tories, by contrast, were usually loaded and so didn't need an MP's salary - therefore they could be trusted to make decisions with everyone in mind, rather than just feathering their own nests.

Did she have some kind of inner wisdom? I'm not sure, mostly because she also told my mum when she was a child that she wasn't allowed to have a scooter because she would end up with one leg shorter than the other.