I’ve never met a MP who was either corrupt or greedy, and yet the witch hunt goes on

The Paul Richards column

There is a simple explanation for the endemic trousering of cash by MPs through the various allowances and expenses schemes which have come to light like the woodlice under rotting timber. It is the one which our ancestors believed when they stood and cheered the burning down of the old House of Commons in October 1834, or nodded approvingly when they read William Morris’s News From Nowhere in 1891 with its depiction of Westminster Hall as a ‘storage place for manure’, or laughed along to the lines in WS Gilbert’s libretto of Iolanthe, which suggest MPs must leave their brains outside “and vote just as their leaders tell ’em to.”

It is the explanation that will be widespread tonight and tomorrow when millions read their newspapers, websites or tune into the TV and radio. It will be expounded across garden fences, from the front seat of taxis, in works canteens and around the water-coolers of Britain.

It runs something like this:

Members of Parliament are all the same. They’re all in it for themselves. They are troughing at the public’s expense. Regardless of party, age, or background, they are a bunch of thieves, parasites, and crooks. To hell with the lot of them. And such is public ire that it will get put in much more fruity and colourful terms than that.

The revelations published in the Daily Telegraph last year did not undermine public confidence in politicians. It was already undermined; falling turnouts and voter disengagement were a much-debated cause for concern through the ’90s, and not only in Britain. What the Daily Telegraph did was give a hard shove to a political class already teetering on the end of the gang-plank. Since then, we’ve been hearing the splashing and thrashing from the waters below as the sharks move in for the kill.

The response from the party leaderships has been hysterical, inconsistent and illogical. There has been a clamour to act tough, but it led to some MPs being scapegoated and others getting off scot-free. No-one comes out of this looking good. The idea that the Alternative Vote (AV) system is the answer to the problem is like saying that colour-coding the deck-chairs on the Titanic might keep it afloat. Electoral reform is needed, which is why Labour proposed it in the 1997 manifesto, but to posit it as the solution to expenses-gate is to woefully underestimate the scale of the crisis.

This has become such a decade-defining issue that the publication this morning of yet more details of MPs’ expenses, their appeals against sentence, and the verdict on whether they had to pay it back or not just adds to the overall sense of venality. The details have ceased to matter. You can wonder at Barbara Follett having to repay the £42,458 she claimed for ‘mobile security patrols’ outside her house in Soho, or laugh at the 40 pence Mike Gapes is deemed to owe the public purse. Tomorrow the Crown Prosecution Service will announce which MPs they intend to drag into court, and so the rest of the week, and the 90 days until polling day will be dominated by more stories of MPs on the make.

But if you believe the grand narrative described above – that MPs are intrinsically corrupt and greedy – then you have some difficult questions to answer.

The first is this: if Parliamentarians of whatever stripe – from Dennis Skinner to John Redwood, from Gordon Brown to John Bercow, from David Cameron to Peter Mandelson – all share the same personality type which dictates their behaviour when it comes to filling their pockets, why are they so different in every other way?

Is Old Etonian David Cameron really basically the same as former miner Dennis Skinner, just wearing a different rosette at election time? Can hundreds of people drawn from so many different walks of life and philosophical viewpoints, in every age bracket from their 20s to their 70s, all be uniformly corrupt?

Or might it just be that instead of MPs being thieves, they were encouraged by the House of Commons Fees Office to exploit an utterly crazy and improprietous system of expenses in lieu of annual pay increases? That new members were shown the ropes by old hands? That they shared the latest wheeze and dodge over tea and toast in the Tea Room, in the shared assumption that no-one would ever know?

When you get close to politicians, as with all famous people, you soon realise they have feet of clay. They have foibles and vulnerabilities. They are made from crooked timber, the same as the rest of us. But I have never met one who I would consider corrupt or greedy. If you were corrupt or greedy, there are much easier ways of making piles of cash than being elected and serving as an MP, which by and large is a terrible job with dreadful conditions. MPs used to put up with the long hours and dislocated family lives because they got good seats in restaurants. Now people think they are criminals and avoid their gaze in the street.

Apart from the one or two who may face criminal proceedings, most MPs were simply playing a daft system which needs now to be swept aside. It reminds me of the glory days of Fleet Street, when journalists made up their salaries with extravagant expense claims (including at the Daily Telegraph). Were the old doyens of Fleet Street criminals? No. Did the system need to be reformed? It did, and it was.

The second question is this: if there is an open and shut case of MPs’ corruption, why has the Legg Inquiry been such a colossal bag of spanners?

Seldom do I agree with Norman Baker, but his analysis of the inaccuracies and mistakes of Legg’s report are spot on. Why have so many MPs had their appeals upheld? And why do so many of the amounts repaid by MPs not match the amounts detailed in Legg? It is a bugger’s muddle on a grand scale. Legg has simply got it wrong in too many cases to be credible. MPs seem more interested in throwing money back in the direction of the Fees Office in the hope of rescuing their tarnished reputations and keeping alive their hopes of re-election in 90 days’ time, than actually reflecting genuine repayment of monies owed.

None of which butters any parsnips in the current climate. Any MP who dares to challenge the witch hunt declares themselves a witch. Anyone pointing to the facts is drowned out by opinion and prejudice. Our politics is burning down, and the people are standing in the street cheering every crashing beam and rising flame.