Chris Huhne is not the first MP to spend time behind bars.
In 2011, four Labour MPs - David Chaytor, Elliot Morley, Jim Devine and Eric Illsley - received jail terms ranging from 18 months to one year for fiddling their parliamentary expenses.
Two Tory peers - Lord Taylor of Warwick and Lord Hanningfield - were sentenced to 12 months and nine months respectively for similar offences.
Jeffrey Archer, the millionaire author, Conservative peer and former MP, was sentenced to four years imprisonment in 2001 after he was found guilty of perjury.
The case related to evidence he gave 14 years earlier when he sued the Daily Star for claiming he slept with a prostitute.
Jonathan Aitken, a former chief secretary to the Treasury in John Major’s Conservative government, was jailed for 18 months for perjury in 1999 following the collapse of a libel action he brought against The Guardian and Granada TV over reports about his dealings with leading Saudis.
Labour leftwinger Terry Fields was sentenced to 60 days in 1999 for refusing to pay his £373 poll tax bill in protest at the levy imposed by Margaret Thatcher’s Tory government. He was subsequently expelled from the Labour Party with other members of Militant Tendency.
In 1987 Tory MP Keith Best was jailed for four months and fined £3,000 for fraudulently making multiple share applications during the privatisation of British Telecom. His sentence was cut on appeal although the fine was increased.
John Stonehouse, the Labour MP who faked his own death, was given seven years for fraud, theft, forgery and conspiracy to defraud in 1976.
The former minister left a pile of clothes on a Miami beach to convince police he had drowned, but was arrested a month later in Australia where he fled to set up a new life with his mistress.
Following his death it was disclosed that he had been a spy for Czech intelligence during the Cold War.
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