Remember who’s the boss, right? (From Bradford Telegraph and Argus)

Remember who’s the boss, right?

8:17am Friday 29th May 2009

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There’s a little-known law that says if your next door neighbour leaves his front door unlocked and a pile of cash on his kitchen table, then it isn’t a crime to go into his house and pocket the money.

Actually, before you go off and start relieving the people in your street of their wonga, I made that up. It isn’t a law at all. But just imagine if it was.

There you are, mowing your lawn, when you notice the front door to the house next door is ajar. Through the window you can see several crisp £20 notes on the table. Would you go inside and take it, knowing that it was completely within the law?

Hopefully you wouldn’t. But that’s pretty much a fair assessment of all this MPs expenses malarkey, I think. Every single MP who’s been exposed for claiming 29p for a box of matches or several thousand pounds for a moat to be cleaned has at some point bleated: “But everything I’ve claimed has been done within the rules.”

Duh. Now as most people who know me will tell you, I’m very often a bear of little brain, especially when it comes to money or morality or – God forbid! – some unhappy collision of the pair. But even I know that just because a bunch of people give themselves a set of rules and then operate within them, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s all morally fine. Presumably, it was all “within the rules” to round up Jews in Germany in 1939 and ship them off to the camps, but there aren’t many people outside of the odd BNP buffoon who thinks any of that was actually an acceptable way to behave.

In my 20 years in journalism I’ve met a lot of MPs. Some of them have been good people, some have become mates who I’ve shared a few beers with, some of them have been chinless no-marks and others have been quite objectionable little powermongers.

Unfortunately for the good ones, they’re all tarred with the same brush now because they’ve all had their hand in the expenses honeypot in some way or other.

Even the word “expenses” is a bit of a misnomer. The way I understand expenses, it’s recompense for money you’ve forked out yourself in the course of work.

I’m sure there’s been more than a small element of “everybody’s doing it, so why shouldn’t I?”, and some of the younger MPs particularly will have been brought into a culture where expenses claims are the norm.

When I first started work as a young journalist I was probably in awe the first time I had to interview a local MP. Then, by degrees, I found that many of them were as human as anybody.

Back in 1997, because I came from a town where a pig wearing a red rosette would get elected into pretty much anything it stood for, and I’d lived through umpteen years of Thatcherism, I felt a sense of burgeoning hope when Labour won the General Election.

Now I just feel very, very let down. Somewhere along the line, our MPs seem to have started thinking they are our masters, and quite forgetting that they are, in fact, our servants.

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