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Saturday 19 July 2008

The Spectator's Notes

Charles Moore's reflections on the week

Derek Conway maintains his position. ‘I still believe I have done nothing wrong,’ he told the Mail on Sunday. To understand why he could possibly think that, one has to dig deeper into British class feeling. In wanting to become a Conservative MP, Mr Conway, a working-class boy from Gateshead, seems to have believed not only that he could serve his country, but that he would become posher. He exclaims that ‘An MP is paid less than a sous-chef in the Commons’, as if this were a self-evident absurdity. He says everything would be fine if only MPs were given ‘the salary for the job’, which he thinks would be between £80,000 and £100,000. But I do not think he could explain rationally why that range might be the right rate — why not much more, in order to get the best, or much less, in order to make sure that no one goes into it for the money? He wants what he sees as the befitting lifestyle, and he thinks the taxpayer should provide it. All MPs want status, but for a Tory MP, this is bound up with resentment against those colleagues who are well off and ‘well-born’. It must be infuriating for Mr Conway that people like David Cameron don’t have to struggle as he has done. At the same time as disliking such people, however — and this is a very Tory thing — he wishes to imitate them. His children are called Freddie, Henry and Claudia and all were educated privately, the boys at Harrow. He is a Geordie, but they are Sloanes. Behind almost every act of financial desperation by a Conservative MP lies some difficulty with the school fees. Until the end of the second world war, any Conservative candidate had to be able to show that he could pay for the running of his constituency association out of his own pocket. Perhaps there should be a modern equivalent by which anyone seeking to become a Conservative MP should be made to promise to educate his (or her) children in the state system unless he could show that he has enough money for the school fees. It would save so much pain later.

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