Tony Blair's expenses un-shredded!

I have been conducting an interesting correspondence with both Tony Blair’s office and the House of Commons commission which is currently dealing with MPs expenses.

This follows my posting re. the shredding of Tony Blair’s expenses. A number of UK news outlets – the Times, Telegraph and Daily Mail among them – “revealed” that Blair’s expenses had been shredded AFTER a High Court order that asked they be produced.

The House of Commons commission has even been quoted as apologising for a “genuine mistake”. When I called them on Wednesday they were still apologising and repeating the account that that they had indeed been shredded in a “genuine mistake”.

However I was called back several hours later to be told they had NOT been shredded.

The Sunday Times had suggested they had been shredded after an earlier court case had failed to prevent such a move. It was, as Blair’s office points out, standard practice to shred expenses after five years.

The freedom of information demand, eventually granted by the High Court, had centred upon opening up the expenses of 14 MPs for the years 2001 and 2002, of whom Tony Blair was one.

Now the House of Commons commission says that the expenses of four of those MPs were “accidentally” shredded, but that Tony Blair’s were not amongst them.

They now say that all his expenses were revealed. This conforms precisely with the view of Blair’s office.

I have been trying to persuade Blair’s office to join our thread and give its own account. They are aggrieved that I did not contact them in the first place.

I guess I would have expected so august and considerable an organisation to have made the case they now make in response to all the other earlier postings.

In office Tony Blair was reportedly never very computer literate. It remains to be seen whether he is now.

Tony Blair’s office is still reluctant actually to offer its own information on this, beyond what I have set out above.

But my original blog posting does beg the following question: did Tony Blair’s considerable property portfolio, amassed while he was prime minister, benefit at the expense of the tax payer? That is a question his office has still not answered.

The House of Commons commission apologised for getting the shredding of his papers wrong. I therefore apologise unreservedly for getting it wrong too.

One of the great skills of New Labour used to be the ability to divert attention from the main issue, with another. Having clarified that none of his papers were shredded, how about an answer to the key question?