How to make our MPs look like beacons of honesty

[BBKing]

Well, is anyone surprised?

Silvio Berlusconi was tonight under withering fire from opposition leaders in Italy after a court declared that he had bribed his lawyer, David Mills, so that he could avoid conviction on corruption charges and hang on to "huge profits made from the conclusion of illicit corporate and financial operations"
...
But since Berlusconi furnished himself with immunity from prosecution after returning to power last year, the court was unable to reach any conclusion with respect to him.

You have to admit that that's a bit worse than cleaning the moat on the taxpayer's tab or 'forgetting' you'd paid off your mortgage. Talking of mortgages, it would be irrelevant and wrong of me to point out that convicted bribe-taking perjurer David Mills is married to Tessa Jowell MP. So I won't. I wonder what international anti-bribery conventions there are and whether they apply to the rulers of nations? Perhaps Gordon Brown's failing is not that he's dishonest but that he hasn't got the flair and sheer brass neck to get away with things Berlo-style?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009...be-david-mills

P.S. Italian politics was turned upside-down about 20 years ago in various corruption and fraud scandals, which led to the rise of, amongst others, Silvio Berlusconi, as an outsider who (so his TV stations told everyone) wasn't tainted by the scandals that had led to the total collapse of conventional politics.

[Matt D]

Hah, yeah. Whatever our lot have in the Commons have done, you can always say "At least this isn't Italy!"

Quite handy that, giving yourself immunity from prosecution...

[Osem]

Beacons? Bonfires or pyres may be more popular....