The Times and The Sunday Times One in three MPs buy in staffing services in this way. It’s a common, standard practice and entirely within parliamentary rules.

Article fails to mention the £1.7 million was spent this way by Conservative MPs and £1.1 million by Labour MPs in past three years. Wonder why 🙄

'Tell Sneezy, Grumpy and Sleepy that this sick-note culture has to end'

My latest cartoon for tomorrow's The Telegraph

Buy a print of my cartoons at telegraph.co.uk/mattprints

Original artwork from chrisbeetles.com

Nice of the Conservatives to admit defeat...

🧵1/5 I'm sure many of you have seen the 'organic' & 'impromtu' viral (on fascist social media) speech by a 'concerned local' in Ballina earlier this week. The far-right propaganda is designed to come across as innocent & spontaneous, 'your average Joe Soap' isn't a racist...

Welcome to my latest weekly update

America is back where it should be: Supporting Freedom.

But I will for my life never forget that in the Republican group - the party of Reagan - a majority of 112 traitors voted against ! #StandWithUkraine

The best thing about yesterday's Congress vote is that now we can definitely tell our defenders: the help is coming.

#OverlookedWomen : Rosalind Franklin.

Died 16 April 1958, aged 37

Crystallographer who took Photo 51, the first known X-ray image of the DNA double helix. Watson, Crick & Wilkins later shared the Nobel Prize for Medicine & Physiology.

A great turn out for the family fun day at City East! Face painting, bouncing castles and the ☀️! Well done to everyone involved and the new art work looks 🤌🏻

I am grateful to the United States House of Representatives, both parties, and personally Speaker Mike Johnson for the decision that keeps history on the right track.

Democracy and freedom will always have global significance and will never fail as long as America helps to

It's greed and self-interest that's at the root of the conflicts in our world and most of the mess that is in our politics. To blame compassion for the end of civilisation is about as wrong-headed as it is possible to get.

Matthew Syed has decided it's time for us to rethink compassion, in his attempt to provide a moral case for the government's plans to reduce disability benefits and to cast people that need benefits as lazy liars and selfish scroungers.

'what we really need is a moral

This is an interesting document - it looks as though the overpayment of benefits due to fraud on the part of claimants is £6.4bn.

A terrible waste of money I think we can all agree.

But this is also less than half the £15bn debt of Thames Water that they are talking about

Hat tip to the folks MeltedParentsNI for arranging this brilliant march today.

Shame they had to, childcare is economic infrastructure and the Department of Education should have taken action long ago.

The sun’s out, and so are Alliance activists in Lisburn today supporting Sorcha Eastwood MLA as the next MP for the area ☀️

If you want to get involved and help make history in securing positive, progressive representation for Lagan Valley, see:

allianceparty.org/become_a_member

We ended the day at the Connswater Greenway Fayre at C.S.Lewis Square. East Belfast was looking good in the sunshine and it was great to see so many families out and about using the greenway and supporting local organisations.

The Ukraine bill passed, as I predicted this morning. $60 billion worth of heavy metal is coming the way of the Russian killing machine. If I were you, Vladimir Putin, I'd dig your bunker that bit deeper. Remember what happened to Gaddafi.

Slava Ukraini!

BREAKING: Huge and momentous news. The US congressional bottleneck for Ukraine military aid has been cleared. A crucial day for the civilized world and democracy and a bad day for Putin.

Liberal Democrats have long been urging the Government to negotiate a reciprocal youth mobility scheme with Europe.

Of course the details would need to be negotiated, but no sensible UK government would reject this idea out of hand.

Possibly the funniest thing you’ll see today unless Chelsea beat City….