The expenses claim, which included a hand-written receipt made out to ‘Andy’, was submitted this morning and has been pushed to the top of the processing pile after Mitchell insisted it was ‘really quite urgent’.
When questioned by the team processing MPs expenses, Mitchell said they were for “stuff around the constituency, you know, stationery, that sort of thing. Nothing major.”
Expenses processor Simon Williams told us, “It’s not unusual to see MPs submit hand-written receipts for large amounts that don’t make any sense, but we have to ask questions about this sort of thing now.”
“It’s not like the olden days when we’d blindly throw cash at them on a whim.”
“To be honest, just asking him about each of the line items got him a bit frustrated, at one stage he even said to me ‘look you bloody ple…asant individual, can’t you just pay it? I’ll take cash now if necessary’.”
“I wasn’t sure how he had managed to spend quite so much on admin and he told me ‘Look ple…nty of people submit amounts like this – if NASA can spend £100k on a screwdriver, then I can spend £80k on some headed letter paper with my name on it’.”
“Which is fair enough I suppose.”
“Yes, it will be in his bank account by Friday.”