Expenses scandal: Brown to repay £12,000

London: It was bad enough that Parliament's expense-account scandal this summer stirred up British politics like nothing else in a generation, leading to daily mockery and dragging the popularity of Prime Minister Gordon Brown to record low levels.

Now the scandal has reached into Brown's own checkbook, in a way that will hardly bankrupt him but, like an ungainly yearbook photo, is providing a fresh reminder of a particularly awkward time.

Officials at 10 Downing St. said on Monday that Brown had received a letter demanding that he repay 12,415 pounds - about $19,670, at current exchange rates - for cleaning, gardening and maintenance expenses at a London apartment and a home in Scotland between 2004 and 2009. They said Brown would pay promptly.

It was an embarrassing turn for the prime minister, reviving memories of the expenses scandal just when it had shown signs of receding as a political issue amid wider concerns about the economy. After a year of pumping money into the economy to battle recession, creating a budget deficit of at least $275 billion for the current financial year, Brown's governing Labour Party faces an uphill battle against the opposition Conservatives in a general election expected in May.

Faced with Conservative claims that he has bankrupted the country, Brown began his day on Monday with a headline-grabbing announcement that the government would seek to raise $25 billion over two years by selling state assets. The properties that will go on the block include the government's share in a rail link through the English Channel; the company that provides subsidized student loans; and the Tote, which operates a nationwide bookmaking network at Britain's horseracing tracks.

The plan drew criticism from political opponents and some economists for being little more than window dressing when measured against the scale of the budget hole. The deficit-cutting measures revealed Monday morning led the news across Britain for only a few hours before Brown trumped himself with Downing Street's announcement of his expense troubles.

Aides said he was one of more than 300 members of Parliament who had begun to receive letters demanding that they pay back expense claims the auditor, Sir Thomas Legg, had judged to be unreasonable, or that they provide more paperwork to justify the claims. Legg was appointed by Brown in July to review expense claims submitted by every lawmaker elected to the 645-seat House of Commons in the past five years.

British newspapers reported Monday that the letters prompted by the audit would demand repayments amounting to more than $1.6 million. Throughout the expenses scandal, Brown has taken comfort from the fact that many of the worst abuses were committed by Conservatives, and that some lawmakers from the Liberal Democrats, a center-left group with strong populist leanings, were also caught making dubious or extravagant claims.

But there was only scant solace for the prime minister in the Legg letters to his main opponent, the Conservative leader, David Cameron, who was told to produce paperwork to back a $345 mortgage interest claim. Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat leader, was told to pay back $1,440 of a $6,200 gardening claim.

Some lawmakers are awaiting decisions on possible criminal prosecutions after Scotland Yard completes a review of the details of their claims. In the meantime, demands for repayments from the auditor have stirred murmurings of a possible revolt from other lawmakers, who said Monday that they were considering rejecting the demands on the grounds that the auditor had ignored the ground rules for his inquiry by applying his own standards of what was reasonable instead of the generous rules in force at the time the claims were entered.

Brown appeared to express some sympathy for that view. In a television interview before his own repayment was disclosed, he said that Sir Thomas had "probably created new rules going backwards." But he added that it was time "for all lawmakers to recognize the scale of public outrage and to make the reimbursements swiftly so as to put the scandal behind them. We have got to consign the old discredited system to the dustbin of history."