Great, a how to graft on a massive and legal scale guide. The European are truely more sophisticated than the backward Yanks. You've managed to take graft not only to an artform, but one that can be taught.

The 'attendance allowance' is especially good- they are paying you extra for showing up at your place of employment. I will be sure to demand it in my next contract of employment.

Using a modest 30% of the staff allowance for household members (say a spouse) and having a mere 25% of the office expenses going for actual personal benefit, and then maximizing the attendance allowance, I came up with something like 123500 pounds (approximately) for the MP. For us Americans, that works out to around $225,000 a year for the MP and his/her household. That's some pretty good scratch. And that doesn't include the travel expenses.

And correct me if I'm wrong, doesn't the EU parliament actually lack any real power? Isn't all the heavy lifting done in the commission?

not only are they paying you extra for turning up, you get paid extra for elaving throught the travel allowance!

Such a generous interpretation of 'expenses' may go somewhere towards explaining why it costs over a million pounds to send an MEP to Brussels – more than two and a half times the cost of sending a British MP to Westminster.

Ah, no wonder Kilroy-Silk and his merry band of freeloaders at the UKIP took up their seats in Europe. Obviously if you are going to work within the system, to bring it down, it makes a lot of sense to ensure you maintain the lifestyle to which you have become accustomed in the meantime.

How hilarious. I wonder if any of you light hearted champions of fair play have ever thought of doing the same for Westminster where abuses of office expenses, London weighting and the like are far more widespread, result in more investigations and have gone on for much longer?
Or would that somehow be disrespectful of the Mother of all Parliaments??