There goes domino number four...

By which, of course, I mean that former MP Jim Devine has become the fourth parliamentarian to be convicted following the expenses scandal exposed during the final few months of the last parliament.

He may consider himself fortunate if he doesn't follow his former colleagues David Chaytor and Eric Illsley through the prison gates when he returns to court to be sentenced.

And still the pulses run quicker in the Morley and Haddingfield houses...

Lord Taylor convicted: the third domino falls...

Given the nature of the evidence which emerged during the trial of Lord Taylor of Warwick, I am not at all surprised to see him convicted of six counts of false accounting in relation to what are now unarguably bogus expenses claims.

Indeed, given his extraordinary admissions (remember, Lord Taylor is a fully qualified barrister who specialised in the criminal law) that he claimed a total of £11,000 in lieu of a salary which members of the upper house are not entitled to, because 'that's what everyone was doing, so I thought it was all right', the only aspect of his conviction which raises my eyebrows is that he was only convicted on a majority of eleven to one.

I fear the noble lord would now be well advised to buy himself a new toothbrush before he returns to court to be sentenced, as a custodial sentence may now be all but inevitable. At this rate, Kenneth Clarke may have to consider building a new prison simply to hold convicted parliamentarians.

He could call it H(MPs) Graft.

And still the pulses run quicker in the Morley, Devine and Haddingfield homesteads...

Eric Illsley MP: The second domino falls...

So, the second of those former and in this case present, parliamentarians to be charged with fraudulently obtaining thousands of pounds in so-called 'expenses' from the taxpayer has acknowledged his serial dishonesty by pleading guilty to obtaining a total of £14,500 he was simply not entitled to.

I was going to say that he had admitted stealing it; but it's actually worse than that. Theft can be - and frequently is - an opportunist crime, committed by those presented with a spur-of-the moment chance to take something which doesn't belong to them.

But Eric Illsley like David Chaytor before him engaged in a sophisticated and protracted campaign of dishonesty and deceit in order to 'steal' that money; and in that sense, his offences are far more serious than simple opportunistic theft, particularly as he is still a serving Member of Parliament and therefore in a position of huge trust and responsibility.

I will not speculate here as to the potential sentence he faces on returning to court in a month's time, but if I was him, I wouldn't be making any holiday plans this year.

And as a corollary, I suspect that with this news, pulses in the Morley, Devine and Haddingfield houses continue to quicken whilst their rabbits' noses simultaneously twitch all the more urgently...

The first domino falls...

As former MP David Chaytor begins his richly deserved, but all too brief, prison sentence for stealing in the order £20,000 from the rest of us, I wonder if pulses are running just a little quicker in the Hanningfield, Morley and Devine households this evening...

Given that Chaytor has been jailed, despite his guilty plea, I suspect that the other three might just roll the dice and put their trust in twelve good men and true, don't you?

But to lapse into the vernacular for a moment, I'll bet their rear ends are twiching like rabbits' noses tonight...

One down, three to go...

If you were ever in any doubt as to why David Chaytor and his fellow former MPs strove quite so long and hard - as far as the hideously renamed Supreme Court - to have the criminal charges against them for fiddling their expenses on a heroic scale quashed on the basis that they were a breach of parliamentary privilege, I suspect that the scales may have fallen from your eyes today, when Chaytor pleaded guilty to three counts of False Accounting at the Old Bailey.

This was after the ritual speech early in the process in which he expressed his determination to prove his innocence of what were charges based on misunderstandings and misinterpretation of simple, honest mistakes.

So he's not just a thief, but a liar, too. Surprise, surprise.

I wonder what the other three are thinking tonight...

Nick and Ed - hypocrites or the converted?

Watching the Royal British Legion Festival of Remembrance last night on the television, I was struck by the fact that both Nick Clegg and Ed Milliband, each of them self-proclaimed atheists, had the gall to join in with the act of worship, including the singing of hymns.

At least Milliband had the decency to look uncomfortable to the point of embarrassment as he perfunctorily mouthed the words, but Clegg appeared to be joining in with some gusto.

I am not an atheist, but I recognise it as a perfectly respectable position to hold; indeed many of my friends subscribe to that view themselves. But am I alone in finding it more than a little hypocritical to loudly proclaim your atheism and then to take an active part in what was a clearly religious ceremony, more than likely for reasons of political expediency?

Wouldn't both of them been better advised to simply stand there in respectful silence? Doing so would certainly have been a great deal more comfortable for Red Ed...

The hounding of Maria Gatland...

I don't imagine it will surprise anyone to learn that the Throne has nothing but contempt for the blood-soaked criminals of the IRA, but I have to say that this story about the 'unmasking' and subsequent hounding from office of Conservative councillor Maria Gatland, a former member of that organisation, leaves me feeling distinctly uneasy.

Mrs Gatland was born in Dublin and joined the IRA as an impressionable young woman, convinced of the legitimacy of their campaign to drive the British out of Ireland and thereafter to forge a thirty-two county Republic.

Yes, joining an organisation wedded to violent revolution - and make no bones about it, that is precisely what the IRA was - was incredibly foolish and arguably criminal, but at the time she did so, she was barely in to her twenties.

To her credit, she quickly realised the true, murderous nature of the organisation she had foolishly joined, when in July 1972 IRA bombers killed eleven people and injured scores more in a series of bombings in Belfast and as a consequence, she left the organisation which promptly sentenced her to death for doing so.

Understandably, she then fled Ireland and came to England, where within four years, she met and married her husband, with whom she built a new life, eventually becoming a Conservative councillor in Croydon in 2002 with the aim of 'putting something back into the community'.

In other words, having utterly rejected the murderous violence of the Provisional IRA at the cost of attracting a death sentence for doing so, she set about building a new and respectable life in England. A full thirty years after the scales fell from her youthful eyes, she sought and secured election to her local council in order to serve her community and make it a better place in which to live.

Whilst I appreciate that Mrs Gatland had been, by her own admission, a member of an organisation which was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of people and the torture of thousands more, both British and Irish, during the course of 'The Troubles' she had repudiated that membership within a very short period of time.

The question I pose is this; is there to be no rehabilitation, no possibility of redemption, for those like Maria Gatland (nee McGuire) who have realised the error of their ways and set about making amends?

Whatever anyone thinks about the IRA and those who were members of it, it took considerable courage - both moral and physical - for Maria Gatland to leave and condemn her former comrades for the callous murderers that they were, and in my view, thirty-six years down the line, she should be congratulated for that courage, not hounded from office amid a tidal wave of political point-scoring and nauseating righteous indignation.