91Èȱ¬

I was at a party the other night, talking to a woman whose former husband sits in the House of Lords.

I was surprised to learn that her ex-husband is one of several members of the lords who once served as a European Commissioner.

Yet in his case, he sat on the Commission before Britain joined the EEC in 1973.

So who is he?

Last week I reported on the extraordinary tale of how two Green members of the Scottish Parliament had effectively managed to block the government's budget for next year.

Never before, I suggested, had the Green Party held such sway in British politics. (.)

The had held out for more spending on home insulation to be included in the budget package. Originally they were offered £22m. Not enough, the Greens cried. So, with about ten minutes to go before the vote, the offered another £11m. But this new money came with such vague conditions the Greens were highly sceptical and duly helped vote the Budget down.

"It's amazing," the Scottish Greens Co-convenor told me in the midst last week of last week's dramatic brinkmanship. "We've got more power with just two members than we had in the last Parliament when we had seven MSPs."

And those at Westminster hoping to hold the balance of power after the next UK election - , for instance, and various brands of nationalist - may like to study what happened in Scotland very carefully. It's possible to overplay your hand.

In the , agreed today, just £15m has been offered for home insulation, less than the Greens were offered under the first deal last Wednesday, and less than half what they might have got in the end.

Today's revised budget was passed by 123 votes to two - those two being Mr Harvie and his Green colleague.

's got a lot of explaining to do.

The Justice Secretary is increasingly being bitten himself by the legislation on party funding which, in 2000, he pushed through Parliament as 91Èȱ¬ Secretary.

In his new role as Justice Secretary Mr Straw is again responsible for overseeing party finance. Indeed MPs are next expected to debate his new funding bill on 9 February.

Yet Mr Straw himself faces embarrassment on four significant fronts:

1. Lord Taylor
Or more precisely, , whom Mr Straw described last November as "a long standing friend and colleague of mine". As I pointed out on Newsnight on 26 January, Lord Taylor was a major contributor to Mr Straw's campaign funds - giving the Blackburn Labour Party £3,000 at the time of the 2001 general election, and £2,000 during the 2005 campaign. Lord Taylor, you will recall, is one of the four Labour peers who were entrapped by the Sunday Times last week, and was caught on tape telling an undercover journalist that he regularly took payments for influencing legislation.

2. Arif Patel
gave Jack Straw's campaign £2,000 in 2005 through his clothing firm . Last April, police raided the firm's office and arrested nine people in an investigation into suspected frauds reported to be worth tens of millions of pounds, involving VAT and imported counterfeit goods. The police inquiry continues.

3. Westminster International Consultants
This firm also gave Jack Straw's campaign £2,000 in 2005, but there are strong signs that the donation breached his 2000 party funding act. Judging from their published accounts Westminster International Consultants (WIC) does not seem to have traded in Britain, and its address is given as a London law firm which, according to today's Telegraph, knows nothing of its existence. Two of WIC's partners in 2005 were based in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. This raises the question of whether WIC is really front operation to channel money to Mr Straw, which is strictly against the law, which states that money cannot be taken from firms which do not trade. The law would have been doubly broken had the money really come from Saudi Arabia, since that would be a foreign

One of WIC's partners, Siraj Karbhari, who used to be a councillor in Blackburn, told the Telegraph that the £2,000 came from him, not WIC. "I am a UK citizen and this was not a foreign donation. I made a cheque from one of my companies. I can't recollect which chequebook I used. If they have listed a donation from Westminster [International Consultants], that is a mistake."

The Conservative MP Ben Wallace has made a complaint about all this to the Electoral Commission.

4. Canatxx
This American firm gave £3,000 towards the cost of a party at Blackburn Rovers football ground in 2004 to mark Jack Straw's 25 years as an MP. This matters, not just because of the rules, but because has roused considerable opposition in north Lancashire with its attempts to build a gas storage facility. And one of their advisers is Lord Taylor of Blackburn.
Mr Straw apologised for failing to declare the money from Canatxx, but last month .

Now Jack Straw is a wily, intelligent politician. One would expect him to be a little more careful about who his friends are, and from whom he takes money for his campaigns.

Especially when he's still in charge of revising the laws on party funding.

As the Standards Committee remarked:
"Mr Straw is an experienced Member ... As 91Èȱ¬ Secretary, Mr Straw put the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act ... on the Statute Book. As Justice Secretary, he is piloting the current Political Parties and Elections Bill through the House. Both have as their theme the need for transparency in political donations. Pressure of work may explain why Mr Straw overlooked his responsibilities, but the nature of his job should also have been a constant reminder to him of the need to observe the Code."

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