Sold Short

So Michael Howard hires out his local Conservative Association's office and holds surgeries in it, paying it out of his allowance for constituency business in order to use its facilities? This whole story really is dying the death now, when they think that this is news.

But there is certainly a scandal of State funding of political parties. It is that without lavish public funding such as the Short Money, plus a few enormous subventions from the super-rich, the parties would go bankrupt overnight.