Spending habits scrutinised

When it comes to campaign expenditure, the team behind Hillary Clinton's presidential bid appears to have forgotten her husband's theme song "Don't Stop Thinking About Tomorrow".

Latest financial statements published by the campaign show that, in January, Mrs Clinton spent $5m (£2.5m) just paying her top consultants. Her team lavished $25,000 on hotel rooms at the Bellagio resort in Las Vegas ahead of the Nevada caucus. And it spent almost $100,000 on sandwiches and snow shovels for Iowa caucus-goers. Not only did she come in third in Iowa, it also did not snow on caucus day.

With the postmortems on her campaign already beginning – even though she is still very much in contention – much scrutiny is likely to fall on her fundraising and spending habits, which at times looked indeed like there was no tomorrow.

She went into January with a $6m cash advantage over Barack Obama, but ended the month so far behind that she made a personal $5m loan to herself. Her communications director, Howard Wolfson, was paid $270,000 in that period. Her chief strategist Mark Penn pocketed $3.8m for himself and the company behind him.

For rolling comment on the US election visit: independent.co.uk/campaign08