FOOD, glorious food . . . perhaps the £42,000 apparent black hole in Ruth Kelly’s expenses claims is full of cheese. Among the odder expenses that MPs are allowed to claim under the additional housing allowance are food for the family: “Reasonable additional costs while you are away from your main home.”

The famously procreative Education Secretary has four young children, which can add up to a lot of cheesy pasta.

Are MPs feasting themselves on the fat of the taxpayer or are they, as many claim, financially distressed by the need to operate in two places?

The answer, as ever, is: “It depends.” If an MP needs to rent a three to four-bedroom house in parts of southern England, the allowance of £1,800 a month barely covers the rent; but MPs in cheaper constituencies can be quids in.

They can use the additional costs allowance to pay the interest on a mortgage. With property prices soaring, by the time an MP retires, the taxpayer has funded a nice little nest egg, thank you.

Even this does not explain the apparent discrepancy between the size of the mortgages of various Cabinet ministers and their expenses claims. Replying, as all the ministers asked have done, that their expenses are “within the rules” does not answer the questions.

Such as: do MPs see the amount on offer — nearly £22,000 a year — and adjust their claims upwards until they as good as match it? Who approved the idea that claims up to £250 need not be backed by receipts? MPs, by any chance?

Matthew Parris says that edging the claims upwards was considered normal when he was in Parliament. “In the early Eighties, it’s fair to say that the general feeling was that Members tried to claim as close to the ceiling of what was allowed as could more or less fit the facts,” he said. “It was a cultural thing; that was the allowance and there was a general feeling that one’s life was much more expensive on account of being an MP, and if you could beef up the claims without telling absolute lies, that was fair enough.”

Fair enough? You decide. Or perhaps the Senior Salaries Review Body will do so for us. Somehow, I doubt it.

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