By Chaminda Jayanetti

The Daily Telegraph has unearthed another dodgy MP with their snout in the expenses trough – this time junior culture minister Siôn Simon, who the newspaper claims 'secretly paid more than £40,000 in taxpayer-funded expenses to his sister'.

Couldn’t happen to a nicer man, really. Anyone wondering just what it is that made New Labour’s machinations so fundamentally vile will learn much from the career of the Honourable Member for Birmingham Erdington.

Putting to one side his loathsome voting record (pro-top up fees – tick; pro-Iraq war – tick; pro-ID cards – tick), Mr Simon was behind an exceedingly tasteful Youtube video inviting viewers to sleep with Opposition leader David Cameron’s wife and make off with his children.

But without detracting from what is clearly the main story here – a government minister breaking the rules – an amusing aside comes lower down the Telegraph report, where it refers to Mr Simon as 'a former journalist', without giving further details.

Small wonder – for one of Mr Simon’s main journalistic gigs before entering parliament in 2001 was writing for … the Daily Telegraph!

Of course, the Telegraph was hardly to know that its shiny new columnist was to turn into a scandal-hit MP a decade later. At a time when the New Labour machine persuaded pretty much every national newspaper except the Daily Mail to hire a pro-Labour ‘voice’, Siôn Simon took up residence on the Telegraph’s comment pages, often getting up the noses of the retired Wing Commanders and foxhunting enthusiasts who made up the paper’s readership in the days before it went all ‘multimeeja’.

But one of Mr Simon’s Telegraph columns surely shines above all others. Published back in March 2001, three months before he won his seat, it is gloriously titled: ‘Labour’s not as sleazy as it seems, believe me’.

Read it. Weep. Roll on the floor laughing your posterior off. There’s an entirely straight-faced reference to ‘the ultra-scrupulous, quintessentially non-sleazy Blairites’. But the coup de grâce is in the final paragraph:

‘This is a particularly un-sleazy government of the world’s most un-sleazy country. Obviously, politics is not origami. There are wheels within wheels within wheels, and they're greased by all manner of things. But that's good. Power and wheels are good. And, as Gordon Gekko knew but never quite said, grease is good.’

‘Grease is good’. May they inscribe that on the grave of Siôn Simon’s political career.