Tally-ho, chaps

Political floor-crossers are always suspect: rats joining a floating ship. Those moving from Tory to Labour are especially suspect, because the exemplify New Labour's obsession with suck up to the mega-rich. There was a sense that the party didn't examine their political beliefs at all, so keen were they to make political capital from the defection.

Amongst the most egregious of these turncoats were Shaun Woodward (multimillionaire, stately home, butler, MP for one of the poorest places in the country) and Quentin Davies, a brash multimillionaire, portly man who epitomised the Tory Squire tradition. Their reward: ministerial jobs, jumping the queue ahead of qualified, loyal Labour MPs with a history of commitment to the party's beliefs. In most cases, more commitment to the party's values than the leadership, but that's a whole other rant.

So anyway, you can take the men out of the Tories, but it's clear you can't take the Tory out of the men: Quentin Davies, we discover, has claimed from the taxpayer to pay some of the cost of repairing the bell tower on his stately home. At last, Labour has a pig to rival Sir John Viggers (you paid for a Georgian-style floating duck island) and Douglas Hogg (moat repairs, which was a wonderfully Norman touch). Perhaps Davies is a sleeper, a Tory secret agent who laid low until he could do maximum damage…