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Soho - bring your own bodyguard
• AMONG all the eye-catching, breathtaking and frankly sick-making details of recently revealed MPs’ expenses, one especially relevant to our neck of the woods is the case of Barbara Follett, the minister for tourism, who has charged taxpayers for weekly “mobile security” patrols at her nominated second home, a four-storey property in a Soho side street.
Mrs Follett thus advertises Soho, an area which is still one of London’s premier tourist attractions, as a place where she finds it impossible to feel safe without security patrols which cost taxpayers £25,400 between 2004 and 2008.
She also charges us for upkeep of CCTV monitors and a burglar alarm system, and £937 a year to insure the art in her town house.
She might as well be saying: “Welcome to Soho! (Bring your own bodyguard).”
Mrs Follett is, of course, married to Ken Follett, the best-selling thriller author whose income is estimated at £13million a year ($20m) by Forbes magazine.
As well as the Soho property the couple own a holiday home in Antigua, a house in Cape Town, a former rectory in Knebworth in Mrs Follett’s constituency of Stevenage (less than 30 minutes by rail from London) and a buy-to-let flat in south London.
Mr Follett has previously boasted that he subsidises his wife’s political work to the tune of “at least £100,000 a year”, and the couple are, of course, well-known as benefactors to Labour Party funds.
Mrs Follett (salary £95,000) says she has not felt safe since being mugged.
But come on. Shouldn’t we have a minister for tourism who can feel a bit more secure in the job?
Robin Young,
Bedford Avenue, WC1
House cleaning
• HISTORY has shown that people in power replicate themselves. The House of Commons is no exception.
If the party leaders are sincere about cleaning up the commons then they should get rid of those dishonourable MPs.
Simon W Pereira
Robert Morton House, NW8
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