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Wednesday 8 October 2008

The Spectator’s Notes

Charles Moore's reflections on the week

It would be a lie to say that I feel sorry for the Tory MEPs who have been attacked for paying their staff allowances to companies of which they or members of their family are members, but they are not the most at fault. Giles Chichester, for example, and Den Dover, did at least follow the instruction which came from David Cameron after the Derek Conway affair: they disclosed. The information being used against them is information they have published. More interesting are those who are refusing to disclose. Roughly, the way the European Parliament’s system for staff allowances works is that an MEP can have the full amount (£15,000 per month) sent to his designated paying agent. But the parliament runs no check on whether all the money is in fact dispersed. Once you have retired for six years as an MEP, you can no longer be pursued for any debt to the parliament. So the likely scam is that MEPs pay out only a proportion of the money and invest the rest. Once they have been out for six years without being questioned, they then invite the paying agent to pay the sum into a Swiss bank account, or whatever, thus enriching themselves at public expense. It would, of course, be libellous to suggest that any particular MEP is doing such a thing, but it is interesting that such a small number of them have answered the ‘transparency initiative’ of Open Europe which asks MEPs how much they pay out and to whom. About half the Tory MEPs have answered at the time of writing, four out of 19 Labour MEPs, and only two out of 11 Liberal Democrat MEPs. All seven Tory MEPs who want to leave the Europhile European People’s Party to form a Eurosceptic grouping have answered the questions. Of the 13 Tory MEPs who opposed leaving the EPP, only four have answered. It is those not yet reported in the press from whom we most need to hear.

The Long Walk to Finchley, the BBC drama about the young Margaret Thatcher, which was broadcast on Thursday night, was, superficially, wildly inauthentic. There were anachronisms of speech — Alderman Roberts says ‘Politics is about people’; Denis declares ‘Like I said before: it’s not a level playing field’; Margaret complains she is being ‘discriminated against’, and says that she will ‘get a nanny sorted’. None of these people could have used these expressions in the 1950s. There were also huge untruths — that Margaret pushed Denis to propose to her, or (even more preposterous) that she tried to manoeuvre Ted Heath to do the same. And yet the programme was enjoyable for two reasons. The first was that it tried to engage with the fact that Margaret Thatcher is not a would-be man, but about as quintessentially female as it is possible to be. The second is that it captured something of the mythical, melodramatic character of her story. As I watched, I kept thinking that her tale should really be told in the form of grand opera.

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