No wonder they’re tring to exempt themselves from the Freedom of Information Act:

A SENIOR Tory MP is paying his son to act as his parliamentary assistant even though he is still a full-time undergraduate at university.

Commons records reveal that Frederick Conway was paid at the rate of £981 a month from the parliamentary staffing allowance handed to his father Derek, a former government whip.

It is, of course, one of his former buddies as a Whip who proposed the Private Members Bill in hte first place.

The use of wives as assistants is a great deal less worrisome, for two reasons. One is that the sort of monomaniacs who actually become elected politicians tend to marry inside that small class of monomaniacs ad the assorted hangers on. There’s many a political wife (and no doubt husband) who would have been (or indeed were in some cases) parliamentary aides, political secretaries and so on. The second is that great feminist trope, that wives are indeed worth their weight in gold…

But undergraduates at a university some hundreds of miles away from Westminster would appear not to meet these qualifications:

The rules stipulate that members of staff must be “employed to meet a genuine need in supporting you, the member, in performing your parliamentary duties; [be] able and (if necessary) qualified to do the job; [and] actually doing the job.

Have I ever mentioned the idea that politicians do what is good for politicians, not what is good for us?