Kirkbride and MacKay: two MPs who don’t give up

Two Tory MPs who were publicly disgraced during last year's Commons expenses scandal, the husband and wife team of Julie Kirkbride and Andrew MacKay, are in hot water again. They have just advertised for rent the flat in Worcestershire that they famously funded with more than £80,000 of taxpayers' money.

The second-floor mansion apartment - housed in a "splendid historic hall" near Redditch - is available at £925 a month.

Louise Marnell, chair of the Julie Must Go! Campaign in Kirkbride's Bromsgrove constituency, told the Sunday Times: "This is disgusting. She's making money from a property that should belong to the taxpayer."

Kirkbride and Mackay's fiddle was one of the most blatant to be exposed during the expenses saga. It turned out that the couple together owned a London home and the Worcestershire flat, and each had claimed one was their main home and the other their second home. It allowed them to claim expenses on both properties totalling more than £170,000 over four years.

MacKay insisted the arrangement had been approved by the Commons fees office. But he then announced last May that he was standing down as an MP at this election. Kirkbride hung on to the bitter end of the last parliament but is now gone from the Commons.

Having both lost their jobs as MPs, it might have been expected that they would need to sell the Worcestershire apartment to raise funds. But a shortage of cash is not apparently a problem: MacKay is leaving Parliament with a pension package and pay-off estimated to be worth £1.8m - the highest of any MP quitting at this election - while Kirkbride is due to receive a parliamentary pension of more than £20,000 a year.

Between them, the couple were ordered to repay more than £60,000 to the taxpayer. They refused to comment to the Sunday Times about the renting of their apartment, saying they were now "private individuals". ·