THE House of Commons stood accused last night of spending more than £2m on a bungled cover-up after publishing details of MPs expenses with huge swathes blacked out.

Critics insisted that the severely edited disclosure showed that the worst abuses at Westminster would never have come to light without a complete version being leaked.

Records of more than a million claims were put on the Parliament website at 6am yesterday, after a four-year Freedom of Information battle.

They included a wealth of detail about the ways MPs spend public money – including on items such as matches, a milk frother, assertiveness training and issues of the Racing Post.

Shadow chancellor George Osborne claimed £47 for two DVDs of himself giving a speech on Value for Taxpayers’ Money.

However, the material bore little resemblance to that obtained by The Daily Telegraph, which has led to more than 20 MPs announcing their resignations over the past month.

As part of a desperate rearguard action against publication, the Commons had passed a measure exempting their addresses and other “security- sensitive” information.

Huge areas of paper were blacked out by officials as a result, meaning many of the dubious tactics exposed by the Telegraph – such as flipping second home designation to maximise expenses claims – would have been almost impossible to detect.

The cases of Labour MPs David Chaytor and Elliot Morley, who claimed thousands of pounds against mortgages that had already been paid off, were only exposed when addresses were checked against Land Registry records.

Campaigner Heather Brooke, who made one of the original Freedom of Information requests, said the security argument had now been completely discredited, and said: “I can see that avoiding embarrassment has been the key motivating factor of what has been deleted.”

Controversial claims by Luton MP Margaret Moran, who received £22,000 to treat dry rot on a second home in Southampton, and Tory former minister Douglas Hogg, who asked for money to clean his moat, would have been unlikely to emerge.

In a fevered day at Westminster, other developments included: ● Tory leader David Cameron said he would repay £267 claimed in error, on top of £680 previously announced; ● Scotland Yard indicated that some of the worst-case MPs could face a criminal probe within weeks; ● And Parliamentary standards commissioner John Lyon confirmed he was considering complaints against Chancellor Alistair Darling and his shadow, Mr Osborne, over their expenses.

The Commons authorities spent more than £140,000 on the abortive effort to avoid revealing details of expenses, before finally being defeated in the High Court in May last year. The 13-month process of scanning and editing all the receipts from 2004 to last year has cost £2m.

An internal inquiry is still ongoing as to how an unedited version of the material fell into the hands of The Daily Telegraph, sparking panic among MPs as more and more faced allegations of impropriety.

But police have already confirmed they will not take further action over the leak because those involved had a public interest defence.

Middlesbrough MP Sir Stuart Bell, a member of the ruling Commons Commission, described yesterday’s disclosure as unprecedented, and insisted it was right that information had been blacked out to protect MPs’ privacy and security.

Gordon Brown said he did not understand why the House had chosen to black out some of the material.