It’s a week for exceptions, it seems. I don’t normally write about gender, but I did that recently. I don’t normally write about internal party matters either, and yet, here I am writing about it.

One Lib Dem blog you’re not going to find on libdemblogs.co.uk is the Agent Orange blog. That’s because you need to provide your membership number to Ryan Cullen if you want to be on it, and Agent Orange wishes to remain anonymous.

For starters, back in July Agent Orange accused Ros Scott, the party’s president, of a cover up over investigations into Lib Dem Parliamentary Expenses. The problem comes from a unwillingness to publish the reports and evidence on which Ros has made her decisions, forcing us to trust her word alone.

This situation continues, with Lord Shutt of Greetland (a local chap, actually – whom I’ve met although cannot say I know) doing a private, internal investigation which came to the conclusion that all claims by Peers were “within the rules”. Ros later explained to Liberal Vision that there was no regulatory definition of “main residence” which screams of a technical loop hole and is pretty disappointing from my point of view.

The Federal Executive will not publish the detail of Shutt’s investigation (I think the clue is in the ‘private, internal’ bit), so all the party can do at this point is cross its proverbial fingers and hope that the Parliamentary investigation of Lord Rennard comes to the same conclusion as the party’s internal investigation. I suspect it will, although that’s mostly because I can’t believe that the Federal Executive would ever be stupid enough to risk declaring that all claims were “within the rules” unless they were pretty confident Parliamentary authorities and/or the Police would come to the same conclusion.

You’d also have to be pretty mad to put the reputation of one or two individuals ahead of the reputation of the party as a whole, wouldn’t you?

If Parliament does come to a different conclusion to the party, there’s going to be some pretty awkward questions to answer, especially when we’re trying so hard to be seen as pushing for greater transparency and tougher rules.