Expenses: What now for Eric Illsley?

Eric Illsley is the only sitting MP currently up before the courts on expenses. He pleaded guilty in the last hour to dishonestly claiming expenses and the expectation must be that that’ll mean a by-election in Barnsley where he has a, 11,000 majority.

But, by the rules, he doesn’t necessarily mean he leaves Parliament. The rules say that any MP who is sentenced for more than one year automatically loses his seat. He hasn’t been sentenced yet – he could be sentenced, like David Chaytor, to more than one year. He could resign even if his sentence was under one year. And the House could vote to expel him if it thought that he wasn’t going but MPs wanted him to go.

Wandering around the Commons, I find what baffles many is how some MPs have come in for the full treatment of the law and others have escaped any investigation at all.

Barry Sheerman touched on this when he went on BBC Radio 4’s PM programme just after his old friend David Chaytor was sentenced. Not surprisingly, he didn’t name names but he is far from being the only person wondering what the criteria are for catching the policeman’s eye.

Labour MP Terry Fields served a brief sentence for refusing to pay the council tax while still an MP but for a comparable case of a sitting MP you probably have to go back to John Stonehouse.

He remained an MP even when he was remanded in prison on fraud charges in 1975. He was an MP throughout a 68 day trial on 21 charges of fraud, theft, forgery, conspiracy to defraud, causing a false police investigation and wasting police time.

He was convicted and sentenced to seven years in prison for fraud and, I think, then chose to resign as an MP. The law that requires MPs to be thrown out if sentenced to jail sentences of more than one year only came in a few years later.

For the anoraks amongst us: since the 1981 Representation of the People Act a sentence of detention for more than a year has disqualified someone from the Commons.

This put the situation back to how it had been between 1870 and 1967 – the 1870 Forfeiture Act had had a similar provision, but this aspect was overturned by the Criminal Law Act 1967 with the result that between 1967 and 1981 there was no disqualification on grounds of detention/criminal conviction.

John Stonehouse could’ve stayed an MP while in prison but opted to resign. The change in the law in 1981 followed Bobby Sands’ election in April 1981 when he was serving a long prison sentence.