38. Letter to Ms Nadine Dorries MP
from the Commissioner, 25 March 2010
Thank you for your letter of 15 March responding
to mine of 3 March about this complaint, and for your further
e-mail of 22 March.
Let me deal first with the evidence I have received
from your neighbours. I wrote to you on 23 February to let you
have the witness evidence I had received so far, including the
letter from [neighbour 1]...
I have received letters from three further potential
witnesses. I wrote to them to let them know the process which
I follow so that they could decide if they wished to submit formal
evidence to me. I attach copies of the evidence I have received
from the two witnesses who have responded, and I will let you
have copies of the evidence from any further witnesses if I receive
it.
[Material not relevant to this inquiry.]
Turning to your letter of 15 March, you comment on
[neighbour 1's] evidence including the possibility that his evidence
is "stretching the
facts" with the encouragement from
a Daily Telegraph
journalist. I will, therefore, shortly be writing to him to put
this allegation to him and to give him an opportunity to respond.
[Material r elating to other matters.] Turning to
the pattern of your overnight stays, I will, of course, need to
come to a view on the weight I can attach to the estimates you
have given me. I need, therefore, to ask you about an apparent
conflict in the evidence you have given me your letter of 1 March
and in your letter of 15 March. In your letter of 1 March, you
said that when your daughter attended school (which she did rarely),
"she would travel
from the constituency house." In
your letter of 15 March, however, you say: "I
was not mistaken in saying that I spent every night in my main
home in September. If I am not in Parliament, I drop my daughter
at school… On the odd occasion we sleep at the constituency
house in September…"
Your letter of 1 March, therefore, implies that you
do stay overnight in your constituency home when your daughter
is attending school. Your letter of 15 March says both that you
spent every night in your main home in September (2008) and that
on some nights in September you sleep at the constituency house.
I cannot reconcile these three statements. Could you please explain
how you have made apparently three conflicting statements in your
two recent letters, and what the actual position is in respect
of the location of your overnight stays in September 2008?
You respond in your e-mail to me of 22 March to the
Daily Telegraph article of 19 March. That article alleges
that your "main
home" is a "one-bedroomed
lodge-keeper's cottage in a small Cotswold village".
You say in your e-mail that it "sleeps
six comfortably".
Could you first confirm that the photograph in the
Daily Telegraph
article is of your Cotswold home? I ask because the picture you
enclosed with your letter of 1 March appears to show the same
cottage, and in the penultimate paragraph of that letter, you
describe this as a picture of "the
constituency home". I assume that
this was a typographical error and that you meant to refer to
your home in the Cotswolds. Perhaps you can just confirm this.
Secondly, in view of the allegations in the Daily
Telegraph to which you have referred,
it would be helpful if you could let me know what accommodation
is provided by the Cotswold property in the photograph used by
the Daily Telegraph (and attached to your letter of 1 March),
and which I take to be your home there. It would be helpful to
know the number of bedrooms, reception rooms and other facilities
it provides.
Thirdly, it would be helpful if you could let me
have the names and addresses of neighbours to your Cotswold home
whom I could invite to give me evidence about your pattern of
use of your Cotswold property.
I am copying an extract from your letter of 15 March
and e-mail of 22 March, with this response, to the Department
of Resources so that they can take them into account in the advice
I have asked of them. I cannot, of course, complete my work on
this inquiry until I have resolved discrepancies in the evidence
I have been given. If you could let me have a response before
Dissolution, that would be most helpful. I will need to resume
this inquiry once Parliament has resumed.
25 March 2010
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