Three months in which MPs and peers finally lost the plot?
I have two close friends who happen to be life peers. Upon entering the House of Lords they were button holed by those already there. One had a house in the Hampshire countryside; the other had a place in Scotland.
They joined the House in the last twelve years. In both cases their “button holers” suggested they claim the country pile as their main home and charge all their travel to these far flung places. They eschewed the opportunity, but they each report that the practice was and remains endemic.
Suffer no shock then that the kindly Lord Paul is accused of designating a flat in Oxfordshire he never slept in as his main home, thereby allowing him to claim expenses from the taxpayer for attending Parliament (total: £38,000). Lord Paul denies any wrongdoing, and insists his claims were within the rules.
How often have we sniggered down our sleeves at the French, the Spanish, Berlusconi, even the Congolese. We are as bad, we simply do it differently – smoke, mirrors, Pugin and name changing honours.
Into this orgy of expenses claiming is thrown the unlucky Tom Legg – “Sir Thomas” for his services to Whitehall – a decent hard working cove who ran Charlie Falconer’s department when he was Lord Chancellor.
Poor man, he has merely applied the prevailing standards for public life as they are administered in the civil service. But MPs over time devised a very uncivil service by which they imbursed themselves. Largely because they would not face up to the necessity of reforming every rule and practice by which they had functioned for most of the last century or more. No wonder they dared not ask the electorate for proper salaries and allowances, but chose instead to pursue dark practices behind the Speaker’s chair.
I suppose I should add that Tom Legg’s crime, if there is one, has been to make and apply new standards retrospectively. It would also be churlish not to accept that the media has played a role in not allowing MPs to sort their salaries out.
Make no mistake, their expenses culture was, some three or four decades ago, the very expenses culture by which journalists, lawyers and many business people lived. But times and standards changed. The MPs and Peers did not.
The scandal at Westminster is less what they did, than that the collective will of both houses that deemed what was going on acceptable. It wasn’t. Every Peer and MP is tainted by this affair. This summer they collectively decided to take their recess whilst the rest of the community got back to whatever work they could cling on to.
Three months of holiday for most Parliamentarians, during which they were happy to let Tom Legg toil. Three months in which they met not at all. Three months in which absolutely nothing was done to forge cross party agreement, sanctified by debate and resolution on the floors of both Houses, to bring Parliament and democratic behaviour into the twenty first century.
No wonder they still give every appearance of not getting it. I have in my journalistic career never known the political classes brought so low, despised, and derided so widely.