The catastrophic vote against MPs' expenses reform may not be the Prime Minister's undoing, but something will be before long Sunday, 6 July 2008 She really does not want to be prime minister. That was my first thought when Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary, voted on Thursday night to keep MPs' expenses payments. Curiously, a colleague of mine had an equal and opposite reaction. He thought that she – and Andy Burnham, Secretary of State for Culture, who also voted to keep the sty well stocked – really wanted to be prime minister. He thought that they were trying to curry favour with the tribal class warriors of the Labour backbenches, who voted down what they saw as a plot by rich Tories to take away support for working-class representation. Someone has misunderstood the "most sophisticated electorate in the world" – a...
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