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Amid the mire of sleaze squelching around the Tory Party, there has been a lack of plain-speaking.
And yet MPs have been using taxpayers’ money to learn a foreign language that has questionable relevance to their constituents or parliamentary duties. For example, Shrewsbury and Atcham Tory MP Daniel Kawczynski is so ‘proud’ of his Polish roots that, in his fifth decade, has decided to learn the language – at a cost to taxpayers of £13,754 over five years.
Commons officials tell me that any MP can apply to be reimbursed for learning a foreign tongue if they reckon it’s ‘in connection with their Parliamentary duties’.
However, Kawczynski is the UK’s trade envoy to... Mongolia. Luckily he’s lost no time courting the mineral-rich country’s ministers in a way that is wholly unconnected, of course, to the second salary of £36,000 he gets from a mining investment company. Hopefully at his next lesson, Warsaw-born Kawczynski might learn how to say ‘przepraszam’, Polish for ‘sorry’, a word he seems to struggle to say in English. The MP was found to have bullied staff and called one ‘useless’ – which is also what his Polish teacher might be telling him after five years of classes.
Tory MP Daniel Kawczynski is learning Polish while Labour frontbencher Ellie Reeves, right, is learning Italian
Other MPs learning a foreign lingo with voters picking up ‘il conto’ include Labour
