VETERAN Labour MP Sir Gerald Kaufman bought a pair of crystal grapefruit bowls for £220 on his expenses, we can reveal.

Sir Gerald also charged the taxpayer £225 for a rollerball pen. And when asked to explain what he admits are a `bizarre-sounding' series of expense claims he blamed `self-diagnosed obsessive compulsive disorder' for some of his purchases.

Sir Gerald, 79, who represents Gorton, one of the country's poorest areas - has already been criticised after it emerged that he had submitted a claim for importing a rug from New York.

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Click on the video player (right) to hear Gerald Kaufman explain his expenses claims to MEN reporter Ian Wylie.

Last month it was also revealed he had tried to claim £8,865 for a 40in LCD Bang & Olufsen TV, eventually settling for a £750 payment.

He now faces further questions over his use of Parliamentary taxpayer-funded allowances after he allowed the M.E.N. to scrutinise full details of his claims. We can now reveal that Sir Gerald:

• Claimed £220 in July 2008 for a pair of Waterford crystal glass grapefruit bowls as a replacement after one of the pair he already owned was broken by his cleaner.
• Charged £225 for a Viceroy Barley rollerball pen, purchased at Selfridges department store in London's Oxford Street in March 2007.
• Charged the taxpayer $41.18 for a doormat he bought at New York's Museum of Modern Art Design Store in April 2006.
• Claimed £4.60 for a `replacement plastic cutlery tray' from the Gracious Home store in New York in July 2007.

In a frank interview, Sir Gerald, who was first elected as a Manchester MP in 1970, defended his claims, saying: "I live very modestly."

The former government minister insisted he had done nothing wrong, with his expenses among the lowest at Westminster. He said: "You may think I oughtn't to have a Waterford grapefruit dish. But I do. And I ate out of it today."

Asked about the pen, he explained: "It's the pen with which I take notes at my surgery, with spares and refills. I thought I'd better get one that would last."

Sir Gerald acknowledged that some people would question paying £225 for a pen, but added: "I bet they won't say that when they see me taking notes about their cases at my surgery." Regarded as one of the hardest working MPs, Sir Gerald said he had received the full backing of his constituency party and intended to stand at the next election.

Sir Gerald said he was a man who `lived modestly' and had been dragged into the expenses row by his political enemies. "I'm just an incidental casualty who did a couple of bizarre-sounding things," he said. "If I can say so in a very chaste way, I live very modestly. I don't have much in the way of luxuries."

He said that, unlike most colleagues, he had never claimed mortgage interest payments on his second home in London - a two-bed flat he now owns.

He admitted trying to claim for the Bang & Olufsen TV had been `daft', adding: "I'd self-diagnosed myself with obsessive compulsive disorder and I'd bought a new television set." Sir Gerald had previously bought a similar TV without claiming for it.

"Then I decided to have a bigger one," he said. "I thought to myself, `Well, you can claim for a TV, so why not claim for it?'

"Because I've got this self-diagnosed OCD, I do things according to rules that I've created. I freely acknowledge it was daft and the Commons were quite right to say, `No, you can't have that on public money.'

"I'm sure that people in Gorton would raise their eyebrows about a thing like that."

Sir Gerald said he needed two grapefruit bowls because one was for him and another `for any guests'.

"As part of my OCD, I have the same breakfast when I'm at home both in London and Manchester every day," he said. "Half a grapefruit, a bowl of muesli with semi-skimmed milk and a cup of coffee with a Rich Tea biscuit. That's breakfast."

A cleaner broke one of the dishes, he said `so I went and got a replacement'.

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Sir Gerald said he did not think there would be any `great envy' regarding his claim for a £225 silver Viceroy Barley pen.

He claimed $41.18 for a doormat from the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Asked why, he said: "Because it was nice. It's quite a small doormat and if you put it in your carry-on luggage, it rolled up quite easily."

Sir Gerald defended his claim for £4.60 for a plastic cutlery tray from the Gracious Home store in New York.

"I happened to be in New York, I went in on the off-chance and I found this tray," he said. "I measured it, because I had the measurements in my head. And I thought, `this'll fit' - so I bought it."

Last month it emerged that the MP had claimed a total of £28,834 for work relating to the kitchen and bathroom in his London flat. It was later agreed that he would be paid £15,329 of that sum. "The block of flats had originally been built by the Co-operative Insurance Agency as a place to house their salesmen," said Sir Gerald. "It was not built to be a luxury block.

"I hadn't done anything with the flat for maybe 35 years and it really was pretty bedraggled.

"It was not in all that good a state - and there came a time when it was not really habitable. And that's why, to the people in the Resources Department, I called it a slum. A lot of my constituents I visited had a better kitchen and a better bathroom than I did. If you were to visit me, you wouldn't say this is the most sensationally-extravagant bathroom or kitchen."

In a letter to a constituent, seen by the M.E.N, Sir Gerald said his flat had `deteriorated so much over the years' he was `ashamed to invite visitors'.

The MP also charged the taxpayer £1,851 for a rug imported from the Showplace Antique Centre in New York, including £389 Customs duty.

"It's not an antique rug, though I got it from an antique centre," he explained. He said he needed a rug as a replacement in a block of flats with wooden floors and sound-proofing issues.

"I suppose I was a bit dim not to realise that some people might regard it as an extravagance, though minus the shipping and the Customs, it wasn't monumentally expensive," he said. I don't know what my constituents pay for rugs, but it might not be all that much more than some of them buy."

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