Whose funding Andrew Bingham and the High Peak Tories?

12.00.00am BST (GMT +0100) Mon 29th Jun 2009

Tory Donor

MPs' expenses have been a tasty and amusing little starter. But after duck houses, moat cleaning and the mystery of Tom Levitt's hair dryer, it's time to move on to some main courses we can really get our teeth into:

1. Electoral reform - universal suffrage and our version of democracy is less than a century old but it needs refreshing with some form of proportional representation. The old two-party system no longer reflects what most people want in the 21st Century.

2. Party funding - we need much tighter rules to prevent all parties being 'bought' by shadowy figures from tax havens. The Tories' Lord Ashcroft is the worst offender. He's a man who refuses to say where he lives for tax purposes - but he's big in Belize. He should never have been enobled. Buying influence is for banana republics, not Western democracies. Ashcroft is funding many marginal seats that the Tories hope to win. So, will the Tories' Prospective Parliamentary Candidate for High Peak, Andrew Bingham, say categorically whether or not he is using the noble lord's Monopoly money to fund his campaign?