Right Honourable

The leader of Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition has called for a ban on members of the House of Expenses Claimants holding outside consultancies in order to supplement their meagre incomes and platinum-plated pension plans. The call comes in the wake of renewed scandal over outside earnings, as a jabbering Thatcherite mercenary contractor and a clapped-out New Labour war flunkey were recorded offering to sell their influence for profit. Such a ban would be controversial, as members of the business community fear that it would prevent members of the House of Expenses Claimants working for anyone other than the taxpayer, which self-evidently would be a most unfortunate development. A ban would also mean that professional people from every walk of life who became members of the House of Expenses Claimants would instantly lose every vestige of whatever expertise they had built up in their previous employment, thereby condemning the country to a parliament full of political placemen, public-relations office boys and braying unemployables, which would arguably be somewhat inferior even to what we have now. On the bright side, there is no sign that any of the two and a half branches of the British Neoliberal Party believe that war criminals or torturers should be excluded from full participation in Britain's democracy.