Audrey Young: What's love got to do with it, Bill?

Two weeks ago when Bill English was being questioned yet again on his parliamentary housing allowance as a minister, he said with exasperation, "What else can I do?"

Yesterday, he not only answered his own rhetorical question, but it became clear that he was already thinking about what else he could do.

By that stage he had paid back the difference between what he would get in an allowance as a minister and what he would get as an ordinary MP, hoping to kill the story.

Now it transpires he stopped claiming any allowance at all in July, and has returned to the Parliamentary Service a full $32,000 that has been paid for his Wellington accommodation since he became a minister again, and Deputy Prime Minister, last year.

And he commissioned a QC's opinion which counters Labour's suggestions that he once held a pecuniary interest in the Endeavour Trust, the family trust that owns his Wellington home.

Mr English's actions have been forced by persistent media coverage of the issue in news, commentary, cartoons and blogs.

And it was not just a matter of Labour keeping the issue alive.

Mr English is not universally admired in National and he has enough detractors in the party who were not unhappy to see the Finance Minister in political discomfort.

The release of figures in August around the individual cost of MPs was the catalyst for special attention on Mr English, the Clutha-Southland MP.

The suggestion by Labour was that he was a Wellington resident and should not have been paid any housing allowance to live in his own home, let alone be given more as a minister.

The issue had died away but was given legs again when papers released under the Official Information Act showed his household had sought an extra $20 a week for an extra hour's cleaning. Nothing he did yesterday will address public reading of that request.

But Mr English injected some emotion into his assertion at his press conference that Dipton is his home, the home he grew up in, that the English family (or trust perhaps) has owned for 129 years, that is on English Rd.

The point he was making was that it wasn't up to others to tell him what was in his heart.

Unfortunately for him, the rules don't say home is where the heart is, they say home is where you go when you are not at Parliament.

Fortunately however, three Speakers have accepted that his primary residence is in Dipton.

The question now is, has he done enough to kill the story again.

Labour are bound to pursue more issues around the Endeavour Trust because trusts and National go together like Labour and pledge cards.

But is there any more Mr English can do? Yes. He could implore the Auditor-General to review the case. If that office agreed with him that he had acted within the rules but that some of the rules need greater clarification for the protection of MPs' reputations and their families, then he would have done all that he could.