The Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards has announced today that he will conduct an inquiry into whether Mrs Caroline Spelman MP breached the rules of the House in the arrangements she made for the employment of a secretarial assistant who was also her children’s nanny for a period from 1997.

Over the weekend a report in The Sunday Times indicated that Spelman’s account of this arrangement was beginning to unravel as it was revealed that Tina Haynes had remained on Spelman’s payroll as a secretarial assistant until the spring of 1999 and not 1998 as Spelman had first indicated.

The Times article also noted that questions were beginning to emerge in relation to the Spelman family’s living arrangements during the period that the nanny was ostensibly employed to carry out secretarial duties in Spelman’s Meriden constituency, a line of inquiry that was quickly followed up by Birmingham-based blogger, PoliticalHack, who revealed both that the Spelman family does not appear to have moved their family home to Meriden area until December 1998 and that during at least part of the period that Spelman claims that her nanny, Tina Haynes, was employed to carry out constituency related secretarial duties from Spelman’s home address due to the lack of a constituency office, Spelman’s entry in Who’s Who indicates her constituency office to have been situated on the premises of the local Conservative Association, the same offices in which is based today.

In response to Michael Crick’s original BBC report on this apparent arrangement, Spelman stated explicitly that she had advertised her home as being her constituency office and she had employed Haynes using monies from her parliamentary staffing allowance in order that ‘she could deal with the secretarial side while the children were in school and then after school provided childcare for my kids.’

Such a scenario would, and could, only have been viable if Spelman’s children were, themselves, placed into schools in or near the Meriden area from September 1997 onwards, more than a year before the Spelman family moved permanently into the area, unless she is suggesteing that, for at least part of her first 18 months to 2 years as an MP for a West Midlands constituency, her constituents were asked to contact their local MP about local issues at an address 140 miles away in Kent.

In short, the veracity of Spelman’s account of her arrangement with her nanny/secretary appears likely to stand or fall on two very simple questions…

Where, between September 1997 and December 1998, did Caroline Spelman’s children go to school?

When, during that period – if at all – did the children relocate from a school in the Kent area to a school within reasonable travelling distance of her Meriden constituency?