Buckingham Palace is quite canny about the way it releases its royal spending figures. The BBC reports today:

The Queen and the Royal Family cost the UK taxpayer £37.4m in the last financial year, her financial public accounts reveal. The cost, equivalent to 62p per person in the UK, rose 4.2% over the previous year, accountants said.

By doing the “How much do they cost each person?” calculation (and that’s every man, woman and child, not every taxpayer), the cost seems very reasonable.

And yet the story seems to come across differently when we hear about MPs’ expenses – £80.8m in 2004-5 is the best figure I can find – when it’s made out to be a huge sum (and, of course, for most of us it is). Compare it with the Royal Family figure, though, and bear in mind that it’s paying for over six hundred of the blighters. Perhaps Parliament should adopt the Royals’ cost per person calculation: using the same population basis, it indicates that £1.33 from each person in this country funds MPs’ salaries and allowances. Suddenly it doesn’t seem to much – perhaps only proving you can do anything with statistics…

Ladies and gentlemen, David “Dave” Cameron.

Thank you, it’s lovely to be here. Now, I’d like to you about my cunning plan to sort out the Human Rights Act.

You may recall that we Conservatives previously suggested we’d scrap the Human Rights Act. This, it turned out, would be problematic as we back the European Convention on Human Rights. So, we’ve come up with a great way of resolving this: repeal the Human Rights Act, but replace it with something called the British Bill of Rights – a sort of “Human Rights Act”.

But our version would be different – oh yes. For a start, it wouldn’t apply to “humans” but to “British people”. No more of this Johnny Foreigner using our own laws against us nonsense. It will be for British people to use in British courts. By using the word “British” several times, we have convinced The Sun, formerly opposed to human rights, to back us. Clever, eh?

Now, I know what you’re thinking. The Human Rights Act is already a British law, codifying a largely British view of human rights, and what’s more the UK already has a Bill of Rights. Ours will be better than that, though. Ours will be a British Bill of Rights. There, I said it.

What will be in our British Bill of Rights? All the good stuff that makes us British. Obviously I can’t yet precisely say what this will be – these things have to be looked at – but I plan to set some lawyers on to the case. Lawyers are, of course, the best people to define Britishness, because having spent so much time in criminal courts they’re familiar with British life first hand. So big up the lawyers.

Some people – let’s call them pro-Europe crime-loving terrorists – will critcise me for being so vague. They may even suggest that this is a desperate attempt to have a policy on something without actually putting forward a proposal at all. Well tish, I say. Tish and pish. I shall deal with that criticism by giving an example of what I would change.

Section 12, for example, of the Human Rights Act 1998 enshrines Freedom of Expression into British law. This sort of recklessness allows Jonathan Ross to be rude about myself and Mrs Thatcher. Well that’s not very British, is it? So Section 12 would be replaced by something more precise, detailing rights and responsibilities. For example, “Subjects shall have the right to go to Wimbledon and to make lovely jam, and the responsibility not to say “wank” to the Leader of the Opposition on BBC One.” The current law is just too vague.

As it stands, the Human Rights Act upholds the rights of foreign criminals to murder us in our beds. I can’t remember which clause precisely does it, but we all know it does. My new British Bill of Rights will make clear – probably, once we’ve decided what’s in it – that we have the right not to be murdered in our beds by foreign criminals, and to demand that any violent death to which we find ourself subject should be at the hands of proper British criminals.

We need to reframe the law to promote a British view of rights, balancing liberty with security. These fancy-pants notions of inherent freedom confuse the public, encouraging them to think they have some sort of ingrained rights rather than passively accepting those the state chooses to give them. This sort of continental nonsense has no place in a country where hundreds of years of tradition dictate that people are ruled by their betters and their children ruled by the children of their parent’s betters, and their children ruled by the children of the children of their parent’s betters’ parents. Thank you.

Peter Black and Richard Allan have more.

That’s the question spreading its way through teh internets this afternoon.

Bob Neill, already employed in various jobs and seeking to become Tory MP for Bromley & Chislehurst, is a board member of the North East London Strategic Health Authority (and you’re right, Bromley isn’t in North East London – well spotted).

According the Part III of Schedule 1 to the House of Commons Disqualification Act 1975, among the “Other Disqualifying Offices” which would prevent one taking a seat in the House of Commons are:

Chairman or any member, not being also an employee, of any [Strategic Health Authority,] Health Authority or Special Health Authority which is a relevant authority for the purposes of paragraph 9(1) of Schedule 5 to the National Health Service Act 1977.

So this is one job from which Bob would have to resign if elected by the good people of Bromley.

It does prompt a big question though, as raised by the Monkey. When Neill signed his nomination paper to stand in the by-election, did he have to certify that he was not covered by the provisions of the 1975 Act at the time of signing? Perhaps someone who knows about these administrative matters can get to the bottom of it.

(Via Rob.)

Not the last one, the one before the one before the one before the one before the one before that (if we’re counting Howard’s unchallenged ascension).

The meme du jour is earliest political memories. I’ve searched my brain through the haze that is the 1980s and while I may have been aware of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the release of Mandela and have a suspicion that my dad took me leafletting in the 1987 general election, my earliest clear memory is from the same month as Ryan’s.

I’d not long started secondary school and Heseltine’s challenge to Thatcher and the subsequent leadership election were covered at school (my memory is hazy about which class it was in). I recall predicting, with my 11-year-old’s naivety, that she would cling on – not knowing anything about politics and having spent my entire life under Her reign, it was hard to imagine anything different.