Swineshead Simmonds

Mark Simmonds, the foreign office minister who resigned from the Government after claiming his expenses were too meagre, used the profit from the sale of his taxpayer funded home to buy a £1 million former abbey in his constituency.

Simmonds sold his home in Putney, South London, for £1.2 million in 2010, making a profit of more than £500,000.

He used his expenses to claim the mortgage interest payments on the property for almost the entire time he owned it.

He and his wife then bought Swineshead Abbey in Lincolnshire for £900,000, a Grade II listed 17th century building with seven bedrooms, stables, a heated outdoor swimming pool, a tennis court and 15 acres of parkland.

Result!

Having made a nice little pile from being an MP Swineshead Simmonds can now turn his attention to making even more money in the real world.

Class act!