Maria Miller, fishing and wrecks
MPs on the Standards Committee, judging Maria Miller, also cast a judgement on the Commissioner for Parliamentary Standards Kathryn Hudson.
On p73 of her original report, she recommended that Maria Miller should pay back upwards of £44,000 of claimed mortgage interest. Admitting that she was offering a “strict interpretation” of the Green Book of expenses rules in place at the time, Ms Hudson was effectively saying that Maria Miller should never have claimed for a penny more in interest payments above the price of her Wimbledon house when she originally bought it.
But MPs when they looked over the commissioner’s report took the view that Maria Miller was entitled to do up a house that was a wreck when she bought it and make it habitable. Some of the additional mortgage was taken out before Maria Miller’s election to parliament, some of it later. MPs were satisfied that the extra mortgage taken out after she became an MP was not claimed for. They forgave the earlier mortgage extensions as necessary to update a new home and turn bedsits into a family residence.
In effect, they knocked back the commissioner’s judgement as too severe and as something consistent with the wording of the Green Book but not its meaning. At the height of the expenses scandal back in 2008-9, who knows if it might have been different.
Whoever it was who told Maria Miller it would be wise to string out her involvement with the commissioner and send lengthy legal diatribes in her direction … well, you just hope she wasn’t paying money for that advice.
Maria Miller seems to have felt that after dismissing the original complaint, the commissioner went off on some kind of fishing expedition. The original complainant was Labour MP John Mann’s claim that Ms Miller was using public money to subsidise her parents’ living costs as they were living with her. The commissioner is discreet about this but is clearly convinced that they were living with her on a long-standing basis well before she came to parliament and that the arrangement had nothing at all to do with personal gain.
What Maria Miller and the legal voice in her ear failed to understand was that the commissioner for parliamentary standards is not just entitled to look at other matters of interest that crop up when reviewing an initial complaint but is required to do just that.
What Maria Miller and her legal friend did understand was that there were very high stakes in play.
Kathryn Hudson’s original wording in her report was: “I find it difficult to believe that Mrs Miller genuinely thought she was entitled to make the additional claim for her extended mortgage in 2007 without consultation… or agreement.” If MPs had upheld that judgement and gone for a repayment around £40,000 (it is they not the commissioner who decide what is repayable), it’s hard to see how her career would not have been snuffed out in an instant.
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