A complaint that Alex Salmond wrongly used taxpayers’ money in an attempt to impeach Tony Blair over the Iraq War is to be studied by the Westminster standards commissioner.

John Lyon has accepted a complaint from Lord Foulkes of Cumnock, a Labour MSP, who accused the First Minister of outrageous behaviour.

Mr Salmond was among several MPs who charged the taxpayer £14,100 in legal costs for a failed campaign to impeach Mr Blair. The legal bill was paid to Matrix Chambers, the legal firm of which the former Prime Minister’s wife, Cherie Booth, QC, is a partner, in 2004 and claimed back by the MPs.

Last month opponents of Mr Salmond questioned the claim, saying that it could not be right that he could claim the money from his office running costs to pull a political stunt.

The First Minister’s spokesman defended the claim as totally legitimate because at the time the SNP and Plaid Cymru, the Welsh nationalists, were using a parliamentary process to hold to account a prime minister who had involved Britain in a war costing £8 billion on a false prospectus. The spokesman said that Mr Salmond’s share of the bill was £790.

The SNP and Plaid claimed that Mr Blair had lied both about the case for war and about evidence of weapons of mass destruction held by Saddam Hussein’s regime.

Mr Salmond appeared to head the campaign and made repeated media appearances to justify the case for impeachment, which eventually failed for lack of parliamentary support.

Lord Foulkes said yesterday that Mr Lyon was to look into his complaint, which was limited to Mr Salmond in the first instance.

The commissioner said in a letter to the peer that his role was to consider complaints where a complainant had provided sufficient evidence “to justify me making at least a preliminary inquiry” into whether there had been a breach of the rules. “In essence, your complaint is that Mr Salmond claimed against the incidental expenses provision to meet the cost of party political activities, contrary to the rules of the House,” he wrote. “Having accepted your complaint, I have written to Mr Salmond inviting his comments. Once I receive his response, I shall consider how best to proceed.”

Lord Foulkes said he was pleased that Mr Lyon had agreed to investigate his complaint. “The issue is not about whether the Iraq War was right or wrong,” he said. “It is not even about whether the impeachment action was right or wrong. It is about whether legal advice about it should be paid for by the taxpayer out of Mr Salmond’s office costs allowance.

“I think it is quite wrong for public money to be used for a party political campaign and I hope and expect that John Lyon will find that is the case.”

A spokesman for the First Minister said: “Mr Salmond and the other MPs involved in the impeachment attempt are all extremely proud of the action they took, and the vast majority of public opinion agrees with them that the invasion of Iraq was illegal and immoral.”

He described the expenses as entirely legitimate and Lord Foulkes’s complaint as laughable.

Mr Salmond was also questioned over his Commons’ expenses after records revealed that he had claimed the maximum £400 a month for food leading up to the Holyrood election in 2007, even though he spent much of the time campaigning in Scotland. One claim was for April 2007, a month, his spokesman admitted, that Mr Salmond spent entirely in Scotland.

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