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Westminster's highest-earning Tory MP forgot to declare £400,000 worth of outside income on time - but remembered to put in expenses claims for 49p pints of milk.

Backbencher Geoffrey Cox supplements his £74,000 MPs salary by performing hundreds of hours of work as a QC.

He broke time limits for declaring the 500 hours of work he did between January and August last year - blaming his office clerk's retirement for the oversight.

But between June and August last year, he found the time to submit four separate claims for 49p bottles of milk, all of which were refused by the expenses watchdog.

His claim for £2 worth of tea bags was also knocked back.

(Image: PA)

He quit as a member of Westminster's cross-party standards committee in October, and was today forced to apologise to the House of Commons for the oversight.

A report by Parliament's Standards Commissioner today branded his slip-up a "serious breach of the House's rules."

Mr Cox referred himself to the Commissioner in October when the breach was revealed.

He told the inquiry into his conduct he had relied on his long-standing office clerk to file his paperwork for him, and hadn't made alternative arrangements after the clerk retired.

Eleven payments over seven months from January to early August 2015 were declared to the House long after the 28-day window for revealing outside income had expired.

(Image: PA)

In 2014, Mr Cox declared £820,000 in outside earnings - 12 times his salary as an MP, and more than some Premier League footballers.

Last year, Mr Cox logged 1,953 hours of outside work, meaning he got paid £20 every three minutes.

His extra earnings alone dwarfed the Prime Minister's salary of £142,000 by five times.

Under Commons rules external income needs to be registered within 28 days, but the sum was not declared to the authorities until September 30.

His apology to the House lasted 49 seconds.

He said: "The House has a right to expect of its members - and particularly those on the Standards Committee as I was - that they will uphold those rules to the fullest extent.

"For this reason I have stepped down from the standards committee and I hope that the house will accept my sincere and full-hearted apology for my failure to observe this important rule."