by Paul Wiltshire

There’s nowhere to put £400 of manure, and there’s certainly no moat or duck island.

The entrance to Bath MP Don Foster’s block of flats in London is utterly unremarkable.

It’s a multi-storey building in a pleasant street in Pimlico - part council rented accommodation and part owner-occupied.

His ground floor flat was bought by a previous resident under the right to buy legislation and acquired by him eight years ago.

Inside, it’s very nice - but there’s nothing in it that you wouldn’t find in the average home.

There’s a double bedroom with a wardrobe, a kitchen which was refitted two years ago, a bathroom refurbished with a new shower three years ago, and a lounge big enough to house a sofa, an armchair, a canvas chair and a small dining table.

As befits the Liberal Democrat spokesman on culture, media and sport, there’s a reasonable-sized TV, and radios in the lounge and bedroom.

Mr Foster rented a flat in Kensington for the first part of his 17-year tenure as city MP.

That, like his current flat, was for the purposes of his expenses, his second home.

He has never flipped - the now discredited process of changing the residence for which an MP can claim the controversial Additional Costs Allowance, and has resisted the temptation to rake in more money by claiming for the greater costs of the upkeep of his constituency home at Batheaston.

Despite the clear lack of chandeliers, massage chairs and in-need-of-maintenance wisteria, Mr Foster is clearly mildly worried about his home improvements.

I’ve seen those bills but, under slightly convoluted and vaguely surreal data protection rules, I can’t yet tell you how much the work cost.

All, however, will be made officially public in the next couple of months - unless the Daily Telegraph gets there first.

If he find himself outed as a bit player in this long-running drama, he knows what he’ll say.

His entirely reasonable explanation is that the costs of his second home would be higher if he rented - and that the work simply needed to be done.

A clue to the cost of the work is given in figures which are already in the public domain.

In 2006/7, he claimed £21,955 under the ACA - a system which compensates non-London MPs for having to run two homes.

The following year, he claimed £22,754 - the highest amount he has ever received, putting him in 243rd position out of the 500-odd MPs able to claim the allowance.

In the financial year that has just ended, he claimed £19,017 - out of a maximum of £24,000.

The biggest regular items are mortgage interest payments on the flat, food - usually a couple of hundred pounds a month, utility bills, and costs such as home insurance, council tax and residents’ parking permits.

Leafing through the minutae of his life, nothing leaps out.

The bathroom-kitchen refurb cost what you’d expect such work to cost - especially when you take into consideration that the bath which the shower replaced was on the verge of collapse.

The dodgiest item I could find was a kettle.

And since it produced a fine cup of coffee, I won’t quibble.

Talking of which, when we later toured the House of Commons, he bought me a cappucino .

For that, he can’t claim as a businessman might when entertaining a client.

Nor can he claim for the many bottles of House of Commons wine he donates as raffle prizes - not that he’d necessarily want to.

He says the vast majority of the £156,906 he claimed in 2007/8 was for items and services where there is absolutely no margin for abuse, interpretation or subjective leeway.

He spent £93,729 on his support staff - who include a researcher in the Commons and four people at his constituency office at James Street West.

And it’s those two offices which are at the centre of the other expense heading which has proved a moveable feast in the past.

In 2007/8, he claimed £20,266 under the Incidental Expenses Provision category.

This covers the non-staff cost of running a constituency office and other non-centrally provided paraphrenalia for his Commons office.

Which, incidentally, is extremely well appointed.

A greasy ladder pecking order operates at Westminster which rewards long-serving MPs by giving them the biggest offices.

His has a separate meeting room which also houses a desk as well as comfortable accommodation for his researcher Alice and three interns - unpaid volunteers who spend up to six months helping him with research, speeches, correspondence and a certain amount of fetching and carrying.

That support is vital as Mr Foster gets no allowance for his role as Liberal Democrat shadow to Culture Secretary Andy Burnham.

The interns can claim travel expenses, which come out of the ICE, along with everything from the cost of renting the James Street West office to a pair of scissors for the Commons team.

Paper clips, business cards, photocopier leasing, toner cartridges, office gas bills, dictation machine bills and window cleaning: they’re all there.

The wierdest item was a drill from Homebase. Apparently it comes in handy for putting up shelves at the Bath office.

Mr Foster, who is 61, is likely to stand at one more election before calling it a day.

He’s angry that his Parliamentary colleagues have brought into disrepute a profession for which he regularly puts in 17-hour days.

And he says he and his wife Tor have at times discussed whether he should throw in the towel.

And that, by the way, is not an item I noticed he’d ever claimed for.