BBC NEWS | UK | UK Politics | MP 'claimed for church donation'.

He doesn't recall the claim. No doubt because it was one among so many. He doesn't dispute it though, so accepts that he is someone who might try to reclaim from the taxpayer a donation to a church collection plate. I suppose we must be grateful that he didn't take money out, but then he didn't need to, did he? He could appear generous to the people around him during a memorial service to fallen heroes, secure in the (thankfully mistaken) thought that the mugs he works for would unknowingly reimburse him.

What the attempted claim tells us is that this is a man thoroughly conditioned to the idea that he could live cost-free at the expense of the taxpayers. Surely only someone with an ingrained, unthinking habit of claiming everything could have allowed himself to do something so disgusting? That would also account for why he (if he's not also a liar) he doesn't recall it. It would have taken only a millisecond of consideration to realise that to make such a claim was wrong, wrong, wrong.

Today is another when I wish I was a swear blogger, so I could call him for the unutterable ****ing **** that he undoubtedly is. The dead heroes he was "honouring" would have known how to deal with the likes of him.

++UPDATE++

More from the Telegraph on this horror;

The fees office wrote on his claim “Not Allowed” and refused to pay out on the claim. Markings on the note indicate the Commons authorities had been planning to blank out the word “offertory” before they were to be made public in the summer, meaning the precise nature of the claim would have remained hidden from the public if it had not been disclosed by the Telegraph.

Once again, the MPs and their servants are detected in the act of concealing the true nature of all those "innocent mistakes" and "genuine errors" which were anyway "within the rules." How dare they bleat for sympathy when every day there is new evidence of a systematic cover up of endemic corruption?

Also worth a look is Cook's own website (which any fool could have knocked up, cost-free in an hour or two). Ironically, the very first words written there are;

THIS SITE IS FUNDED THROUGH PARLIAMENTARY ALLOWANCE

So he took the £10,000 offered for "communication allowances." No surprise there. It would be far more accurate to put "This life funded through Parliamentary allowance" beneath every picture of the odious little man. It's interesting to note how obsessed with money his website is. His bio reveals that he had to be bribed to join the Labour Party in the first place;

Frank joined the Labour Party (League of Youth) in Hartlepool in 1950, partly because his mother offered him a good bicycle if he did so.

Who was more likely to know his true character than his mother, after all? Clearly she already had him down for a Mammonite at an early age. Revealingly, he feels the need to tell us of his financial sacrifice in becoming an MP, referring to his old job as;

a post which actually carried a higher salary than that of an M.P. at the time

There's not much doubt about his motivations in using the expenses system, is there? Subconsciously he seems to have been justifying his behaviour to his (then blissfully-ignorant) consituents right there! While he claims to be "Old Labour" and a left-winger, his site reveals again how the temptation to make a buck has overwhelmed his "principles"

More trouble with his local Party followed Frank’s action in October 1987 in applying to buy – with the benefit of the generous discount available to all local authority tenants under the 1980 Housing Act – the council house in Billingham in which he and his family had lived for twenty four years. This transaction ought to have been a private one between himself and Stockton-on-Tees Borough Council but was leaked to the media by someone (possibly a Labour councillor, though the person’s identity never came to light) denounced in December 1988 by Frank as a coward.

Isn't it amazing how keen these leftists are on their privacy when their own financial interests are at stake? Yet for the rest of us, "...if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear..." Of course, I have no problem with the privatisation of council housing that should never have been funded by taxpayers in the first place, but our Frankie did, which is why he wanted his transaction to be private. He boasts of his litigious nature;

Legal action was taken by Frank against the Northern Echo and its journalist Chris Brayshay who, in common with other local media, had accurately reported the criticism of Frank’s council house purchase by some prominent members of his local Party and the effect of the discount in bringing down the price of his home from £15,550 to £7,153. Brayshay however had gone further and stated that by this transaction Frank had contravened Labour Party policy.

Given that and the nasty streak, which leads him to suggest that official correspondents who call him out on his failing to honour promises that they are in need of psychiatric help, one can imagine why the person who leaked the council house story to the press wanted to remain anonymous. That Frank calls him/her a coward, is ironic, given that he was so keen on remaining anonymous himself in the given "transaction!" It's also delightful to note that he feels contravening Labour Party policy is more serious than contravening his left-wing "principles".

I hope the campaign to commemorate Air Chief Marshal Sir Keith Park, who commanded the RAF’s 11 Group Fighter Command during the Battle of Britain will now disown this chiselling little toad as an "official supporter." His name does not deserve to be associated with that of a brave man.