Today’s Independent carries a report that Boris Johnson used £1,955.25 of taxpayers’ money to pay for his hotel room at the last year’s Conservative Party conference.
I’m sure we’re meant to be horrified over this ‘revelation’ but I can’t really get very excited about yet another ‘Boris in trouble’ story because, in the scheme of past GLA expense rows, £2k is a pathetically small sum almost unworthy of notice in the wake of multi-thousand pound taxi bills for Assembly Members (which even managed to catch poor Konnie Huq in the crossfire) and £30k trips to Cuba.
According to the Independent, Boris’s office says he attended in his capacity as Mayor and that the spending wasn’t a case of using public funds for political purposes. Personally, if Boris says he stayed in the hotel solely in his capacity as Mayor and dreamt only Mayoral dreams in his taxpayer-funded bed I’m prepared to take his word for it.
That said, he did find time to engage in political knockabout which probably isn’t the best way to spend any part of a trip being paid for by the public when you’re talking up your commitment to providing value for the GLA precept.
