Former Minister: MacShane shouldn't be jailed

Denis MacShane should not have been jailed for making bogus expense claims as he has already suffered enough, a Labour former minister said today.

Tom Harris, who has known MacShane since 2001, said his Labour colleague should not have been imprisoned as the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) and the police accepted he had not gained personally from the claims.

MacShane, a former Europe minister and MP for Rotherham, was jailed for six months at the Old Bailey after admitting making bogus expense claims amounting to nearly £13,000.

The 65-year-old, who stood down as an MP earlier this year, had previously pleaded guilty to false accounting by filing 19 fake receipts for "research and translation" services. He used the money to fund a series of trips to Europe, including one to judge a literary competition in Paris.

Mr Harris said his former colleague should not have been jailed because he did not gain personally from the fraud, unlike other MPs who had been sent to prison as a result of the expenses scandal.

MacShane's guilty plea followed more than four years of scrutiny into his use of Commons allowances.

Parliamentary authorities began looking at his claims in 2009 when the wider scandal engulfed Westminster, and referred him to Scotland Yard within months.

But the principle of parliamentary privilege meant detectives were not given access to damning correspondence with the standards commissioner in which MacShane detailed how signatures on receipts from the European Policy Institute (EPI) had been faked.

The body was controlled by MacShane and the general manager's signature was not genuine. One message, dated October 2009, said he drew funds from the EPI so he could serve on a book judging panel in Paris.

It was not until after police dropped the case last year that the cross-party Standards Committee published the evidence in a report that recommended an unprecedented 12-month suspension from the House.