No smoking gun but still lots of questions

Cornwall Council has got through the first working day of the Daily Telegraph's "spending card scandal" relatively unscathed.

Silk ties - nailed at 7am. £1,080 on Rick Stein's restuarant? It wasn't for food or drink, but payment for a Future Jobs Fund project recouped from the Department of Work & Pensions. The One Eyed Cat restaurant bill for £1,269? A lunch for 43 people as part of a European Union project about higher education, recouped in its entirety from the EU.

So here are a few more items which, on the face of it, merit further inquiry:

* £2,425.20 on mobile phone socks
* £1,260 for a senior official and two councillors to stay at the Palace Hotel
* Several hundred pounds in various pubs
* Two nights accommodation at the Alveston House Hotel for two people, at £90pppn, totals £360 - yet the bill was for £540. So what was the £180 "extras" and what was the purpose of the stay?
* £500 bills at Sainsbury's supermarkets

I've just emailed a few dozen questions of this nature and look forward to the answers in a few days. There may well be perfectly acceptable explanations, although on the face of it a £3,000+ return taxi ride to Bolton will take quite a bit of explaining (did they go via New York?)

I'm keen to clarify the council's policy on alcohol and whether these cards can be used this way - it seems it might be OK to have "some" alcohol with a meal, but no-one seems to know how much "some" actually is.

I've also asked the council to clarify its spending on consultants. The data for 2010-11 should now be available so that we can make valid year-on-year comparisons.

One area where the council is clearly struggling is the way it handles information - a Freedom of Information request which contained serious errors, as well as breaching data protection laws, was sent to a national newspaper without being checked. As usual, the cock-up theory of history appears to be winning over the conspiracy theory - but that's probably no cause for celebration.