Richard Benyon Minister for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs from 2009 until the 2010 general election when he entered government. He was also one of the first 15 MPs to support David Cameron's Conservative Party leadership bid. In May 2009, he was listed by "The Daily Telegraph" as one of the "saints" in the expenses scandal exposed by that newspaper. He was made Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State at the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs in the first Cameron Ministry. and remained in post until the junior and middle ranking Cameron reshuffle of October 2013. In 2012, while Wildlife
First-past-the-post voting dramatic change in voting behaviour. In the UK, the Electoral Reform Society estimates that more than half the seats can be considered as safe. It has been claimed that MPs involved in the 2009 expenses scandal were significantly more likely to hold a safe seat. However, other voting systems, notably the party-list system, can also create politicians who are relatively immune from electoral pressure. The winner-takes-all nature of FPTP leads to distorted patterns of representation, since party support is commonly correlated with geography. For example, in the UK the Conservative Party represents most of the rural seats, and most of