LORD Mandelson today rejected claims he used taxpayers cash to renovate his home for profit, insisting the money was spent on essential maintenance.

The Business Secretary and former Hartlepool MP, reacted to reports in the Daily Telegraph which disclosed he ran up bills of almost £3,000 on work to his constituency home in Hartlepool.

Lord Mandelson said the report - which details a £1,500 gardening bill and £1,350 in house repairs - was presented to provoke public anger.

"The fact is that these allowances would not have been paid if they weren't within the rules," he told BBC Radio Scotland's Good Morning Scotland programme.

"When you see something like this in a paper like the Telegraph you can either react with sort of boiling anger at the attempt to smear or traduce half the cabinet and you should rail at what motivates a Tory supporting paper to mount an operation like this.

"Or you take it more philosophically, you accept that this is what passes for modern journalism - you don't allow yourself to be diverted from it as a minister and you get on with your day job, and that's what I intend to do."

Lord Mandelson, who was in Edinburgh today to meet business leaders, continued: "If you take the expenditure, for example, on my constituency home in Hartlepool, which they say was to renovate my home or to improve it.

"It wasn't, it was to repair it, it was to undertake essential maintenance on my home, not to enhance it.

"I think to create a different impression is frankly dishonest.

"I don't blame members of the public reacting in the way they do. This story has been presented in precisely that way in order to provoke such a reaction."

He went on to say anyone could raise questions over expenses claims and added: "Let's wait and see whether the Conservatives, who this paper supports, gives them quite the same prominence, quite the same space that today's paper has given to members of the Labour party's cabinet."