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
Nova Scotia parliamentary expenses scandal MLAs in his report, and said that no one had violated the law currently in place, all three parties in the Nova Scotia legislature were blamed for reckless spending, and announced his hope that more attention would be focused on repairing the expenses system rather than on demonizing legislators. In the wake of the Auditor General's report, Speaker Charlie Parker compiled a full list of "questionable expenses", which was made public on February 8. On February 9, 2010, the first political casualty of the scandal occurred when Richard Hurlburt, Progressive Conservative MLA for Yarmouth, resigned days after the Auditor General's