A former MEP was sentenced to two years in prison today after fiddling his expenses to channel £39,000 into a secret bank account.

Tom Wise, 61, who was elected for Ukip but lost the party whip when his offences emerged, accumulated the money over 13 months, spending it on a new car and fine wines.

Wise becomes the second of the party’s 12 MEPs elected in 2004 to go to prison. Ashley Mote was jailed for nine months for benefit fraud in 2007.

Wise is thought to be the first British politician to be imprisoned for fiddling parliamentary expenses.

He pretended the £3,000 “secretarial assistance allowance” he received from Brussels every month was for his 62-year-old researcher Lindsay Jenkins, but she was only given a small percentage.

London’s Southwark Crown Court heard he spent most of it on a lavish lifestyle, clearing credit card debts and funding party political activities.

Judge Geoffrey Rivlin QC said his “sleight of hand” amounted to a “prolonged gross breach of trust”.

“This was very deliberate and blatant dishonesty,” he said. “You knew the system of expenses inside out and this was a claim you devised and planned with some care.”

When Wise’s plot was exposed in a Sunday newspaper, he tried to extricate himself from the affair by repaying much of the cash.

Mark Fenhalls, prosecuting, said that Wise could have accumulated £180,000 if his fraud had gone undiscovered.

Wise, of Ship Road, Leighton Buzzard, Bedfordshire, who continued to sit as an independent MEP after leaving Ukip, originally denied false accounting between October 14 and November 16 2004.

But during his trial, and just before Ukip leader Nigel Farage was to give evidence against him, Wise confessed.

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