Loughton, liar or lawbreaker?

Interesting letter this week in the Harald, from our MP Timmy (The Lought) Loughton. He is again trying to justify his existence and the cash he is snaffling from the trough. He also tells some whopping fibs but that's a matter to be addressed another day.

Here's the interesting part of his epistle to the local rag.

Blurriness due to crap printing at the Harald.

Anyway, there are a few things that stand out in this paragraph, he uses the generic "Sussex" rather than specifying East or West, which are two different counties, so he may as well claim that we are all Hampshire after all.

It's interesting that he claims that the home in Burgess Hill is, and has been his "family home" since before he became an MP. If this is the case, then why, when he became an MP did this become his "Second Home" in order to claim mortgage payments of around £24k a year and about £400 a month in heating oil among other quite excessive expenses payments. Surely if he claims that this is definitely his family home and not his second residence, then he shouldn't have been claiming expenses on it for all the years that he did.

Now the main point of this post is really to address the fact that he claims that his home is "all of 12 minutes" from Shoreham, now let's look at that in detail.

Here's the shortest route between Lought's House and the Civic Centre in Shoreham.

Ok, so we have to accept that Loughton doesn't travel by helicopter, because he claims expenses for his car in order to travel to work in Shoreham, so that would be a journey of 14.635 miles.

So, using a simple time, speed and distance calculation that we all learned in O' Level maths, but needn't have because there's an app for that these days.

In order to make that journey in 12 minutes, as claimed in Timmy's letter, he would have to achieve an average speed of around 73mph, and as this journey goes through Ditchling this average would require some serious "making of time" on the A27. There is the possibility that Timmy prefers a different route to the one pictured (the shortest route), however this would increase the distance therefore increasing the average speed required to complete the journey in 12 minutes as claimed.

As the lowest average speed required to complete this journey is more than the legal speed limit on British roads, in order to average this speed one would have to hit more than 80mph at least once during this journey, and considering that the majority of the journey would be on single carriageway roads where 60mph would be the very maximum speed permitted, Timmy is telling us that every time he visits Shoreham he breaks the law.

There is always the possibility that his claim of "12 minutes" is just as fanciful as all of his other claims and should be taken with a pinch of salt.

You can decide, did he just admit to breaking the law, or did he just lie in a published letter? It has to be one or the other.

I CBM