The quote of the day...

…comes from Jim Devine, one of the MPs who has been charged over the expenses scandal, in an interview that frankly defies belief. Both Dale and the Angry Baby Man have the full video. There’s no shortage of staggeringly stupid “gems”, but this reasoning as to why he did something wrong is startling:

In my innocence, I was told that was acceptable.

Yes, because ignorance of the law is a perfectly acceptable defence, isn’t it? Oh, wait…

And he prattles on:

We’re not arguing we are above the law.

Yes you are. Particularly when you demand some sort of spurious trial in the House of Commons. It is a bit like a small businessman demanding trial by a bunch of blokes down his local if he’s accused of not paying enough tax. The law is quite clear – it doesn’t matter if you committed your crime out of ignorance, it is still a crime.

But what is most startling about this video is not the desperate, self-serving pleading of a man who has been caught out – let’s be honest, we’re all used to that by now – but rather how thick Devine seems to be. He genuinely seems to be a bit simple. Christ knows how he became a MP – possibly he wrote to Jimmy Saville or something. He seems to have the intellectual capacity of a pot plant and the charisma of a sloth on Valium. If this is the calibre of an MP these days, it is no wonder we end up with party leaders as vapid as Brown, Cameron and Clegg. They are positively convincing next to this moron.