Julie Kirkbride fights for her political future in Bromsgrove
May 28 2009 By Jonathan Walker
And she confirmed her brother lived rent-free in a taxpayer-funded flat but said he helped run the family home.
She acknowledged she would have to quit if Mr Cameron asked her to go at the next election.
“If David Cameron asks me to go, then of course I will do as he asks,” she said.
She said she would be meeting people in her constituency on the doorstep today and Saturday, although she would not be attending an open meeting organised by the local “Julie Must Go” campaign on Sunday.
“I can understand why people are angry with me, with my husband and with MPs in general,” she said.
But she stressed that the Tory leader had accepted that her arrangements were “quite separate and quite different” from her husband.
Asked whether she had known how her husband was structuring his expenses claims, Ms Kirkbride replied: “I was aware that he had that advice, and at the time I was a new MP.”
She said at that stage she was “taking advice” from Mr MacKay, who had already been an MP for some years, over many issues to do with her job.
She accepted he had made an “error of judgment” by making the claims.
Pushed on her decision to pay her sister, Karen Leadley, a £12,000 salary from allowances for part-time secretarial work, Ms Kirkbride replied that she did an “absolutely fantastic job”.
“My secretary has been my sister for about 12 years,” she added. “It has been quite open, everyone has known that my sister worked for me.”
Ms Kirkbride insisted that she still hoped to stand again at the next election, although she acknowledged that her prospects depended on the support of her local constituency party.
“I would dearly love to be re-elected to the job that I simply adore and which has been very fulfilling and personally very satisfying for me over the last 12 years, but that is not my decision,” she said.
She indicated she did not intend to pay back any of the money she had claimed unless she was ordered to do so by the Conservative Party’s scrutiny panel which is looking at the claims of all Tory MPs.
“My husband and I are still waiting the judgment of the Conservative scrutiny panel and whatever those judgments are we will certainly abide by them,” she said.
There were signs that the party’s grassroots had turned against Ms Kirkbride, with a survey for website ConservativeHome suggesting 81 per cent of members thought she should go.
