My office isn’t anywhere near the office my staff use in Parliament. Not terribly convenient so, when the person in the office next to my staff moved out, I thought – ah, why don’t I see if I can swap my office with the now empty one?

They’re pretty much the same, except one is next to my staff and the other is some way away.

Simple, sensible, straight-forward? Oh no, this is Parliament. You’d have thought I’d asked for a whole new floor to be added to Portcullis House or something like that.

One year on (yes – one year!) this is still in limbo because, basically, the Conservative and Labour Chief Whips have vetoed the office move. Or rather – they’ve said I can move, but only if all the Liberal Democrats promise to not ask for any other moves or anything else similar between now and the next general election (whenever that may be) for any MP or their staff.

Well, that’s pretty silly – one might even say childish – condition. Why try to attach such a condition anyway – especially as all we’re talking about is effectively moving the empty office from one location to another?

And what if some other similar sensible swap opportunity comes up? They’re basically saying – tough, no matter how sensible or necessary any other changes might be – you can’t have them. Because we’re the Labour and Tory Chief Whips and we say so.

And what if, say, an MP or one of their members of staff, have – please no – a serious accident and therefore mobility problems? Sorry – no chance of then moving office to one more convenient, because Conservative and Labour Chief Whip would have said IT MUST NOT BE DONE.

You may have guessed by now – I’m not impressed! So we’re lost in a world of complicated three way negotiations (hello Henry Kissinger – fancy a negotiation job?).

I cite this as an example of the utter stupidity of some of the practises at the Commons. This is about childish display of power and nothing to do with making the appropriate decision.

The whole allocation of office space in Parliament is a mess – and this one year to sort one empty office makes the eight weeks it took to give me an office at all when first elected seem quite short by comparison!

So come on Patrick McLoughlin (Tory) and Geoff Hoon (Labour) – show some sense!

Excellent news: Mrs Jill Pay has been appointed to be the Serjeant at Arms at Parliament. First woman ever in the post – hurrah! She is lovely – and I am not surprised that she has been promoted so swiftly.

Google are on a charm offensive. Such a successful product. We nearly all use Google Search – don’t we? And thus – earlier this week I visited their London offices – and found out!

They gave us a tour of their offices. In short: it was geek heaven. The Google logo and colours stream through every department – reminiscent of a children’s nursery. Primary colours – and decorated departments. Toys and props of all sorts – cuddly, inflatable, cardboard cut-out everywhere. Quite a few plants and several pieces of immiation picket fencing. Not quite sure why the fencing is so popular!

They are very idealistic about the story of two kids in a garage who make it big in e-land with innovation and good motives, launching new products for free and letting the world play with them. The overall message: we are all nice people who want to bring information to the world. When we get our revenue later (clearly quite a lot of revenue) – it’s a side effect of success.

All in all – I was impressed with the organisation. But there are issues of privacy and domination as this giant of the information world expands its operation and areas at the rate of knots.

Getting the information you want quickly and accurately is good – and if that includes relevant adverts which interest me, that’s fine. But what about when that targeting is used to push products at vulnerable people who end up getting exploited by being sold a product that’s supposedly the answer to all their problems? Or if the information about us isn’t held securely enough and someone gets to pry into your life? (Google have a better record at protecting information than our government – but as the old saying goes, the only totally secure computer is one switched off and locked away with all its cables pulled out). Or if the two founders retire and the firm is driven by people with different outlooks on life? And so on.

Everyone there is young, young, young. Google too is young – hard to believe in some ways that they are only nine years old. Can’t imagine a world without Google!

Well! That was quite a varied TV piece I just did for Sky News – their 7:30pm round-up featuring the most popular stories on the internet. You can read more about the topics on their site and also a quick piece from me about how we should change the rules to do with MPs and their expenses following the Derek Conway affair:

Day in day out I question how taxpayers money is spent by the government therefore it is perfectly reasonable that the taxpayer should be able to question how I spend their money.

If we want voters to believe that we are honourable members, we simply cannot be afraid to open ourselves to real independent scrutiny.

UPDATE: You can watch the piece on the Sky website.