Pergola
Margaret Beckett
£711 labour and materials in the garden

The caravan-loving Cabinet minister’s appreciation for the outdoor life does not end with the odd wet weekend in Wales. Her ambitious back-garden construction plans were re-buffed when the fees office raised concerns over paying for her summer house, shed and pergola. The £600 bill for pot plants and hanging baskets didn’t go down too well either.

Alistair Darling
Stamp duty “holiday”
£2,260

The Chancellor’s credit crunch plan to get the property market moving was the implementation of a “stamp duty holiday” late last year. Wonder where he got that idea from? Taxpayers helped him to his very own taxation vacation in 2005 when he put the stamp duty on his new house in South London on expenses.

David Miliband
Pot plants
Around £180 every three months

Even his own gardener could not work out why the current Foreign Secretary wanted to pay him so much taxpayers’ money when he very rarely visited his constituency garden.

The gardener wrote at the foot of one receipt: “Please let me know if you would like pots making up at front and back this year, given the relatively short time you’ll be here and their labour intensive nature.”

Gordon Brown
Pest control
£352

The future Prime Minister’s home overlooking the Firth of Forth became infested with mice. Pest control advisors suggest that keeping a clean and tidy home helps prevent rodents from settling in.

John Prescott
Toilet seat repairs
Part of £210.79 bill

Two loo seats for Two Jags. It is unclear how the heavy-weight former frontbencher damaged his toilet seat – but he managed it twice in a year.

Shaun Woodward
Ben: Story of Ben Hardwick (Paperback)
(cost unknown)

The millionaire minister claimed for a second-hand copy of the book he wrote with Esther Rantzen in 1985.

Let’s hope he didn’t pay too much for the tome as scores of copies are available in the “low cost” section of the Amazon website for a single penny plus £2.75 post and packing.

Maltesers
45 pence

Spending all this public money on home improvements sure is hard work, so who can blame the unknown Labour backbencher who needed the revitalising power of chocolate treats during an arduous trolley-filling dash through a Focus DIY store.

Gordon Brown
Blocked lavatory
£88.13

There are no details on why the Prime Minister’s U-bend became obstructed but a quick trawl of the archives reveals that February 2007 was the very month that a Times poll revealed Labour MPs did not want him to follow Tony Blair into No. 10.

John Prescott
Mock Tudor facade
£312

Nothing says class like mock Tudor beams. And the former Deputy Prime Minister adores them. Not content with the 12 already adorning the front of his constituency home in Hull he, sorry we, invested in three more in 2006.

Jellied eels
£1.31

You can take the barrow boy* out of Essex, you can buy him a suit, you can even make him a Member of Parliament but you absolutely cannot stop him eating jellied eels.

*this Essex MP is anonymous. Claiming that he/she is a barrow boy is nothing but wild speculation