Another Voice | 4 July 2009

It is good that MPs have second jobs — but they should share the proceeds

No columnist should read too much into online responses to what he has written. No more than those who call in to radio phone-in programmes are those who post their comments online representative of readers as a whole — let alone the population as a whole. But I try to read properly the letters readers write or the comments they post online, because the sample of those moved to respond, though unrepresentative, is significant. It may tell you something about way the wind blows.

So were I a Conservative MP I would have been depressed to scan the online response from Times readers to a column I wrote there last week. I mentioned in passing (it was not my main theme) that some people believe MPs should be free to have outside earnings. If any subset of the overall electorate were disposed to give this argument a hearing, it would surely be the readers of quality newspapers.

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Julie Burchill

The march of the trans mob is over

‘Matthew: this is one of the most inane and hilarious Times Comment articles ever. MPs of any party should NOT have second/third etc jobs — Peter in London.’

‘We think being an MP is just a job… This MUST be full time, liaising with constituents, on parliamentary business and keeping informed on key issues — Richard, Cheltenham.’

Opinion polling will, I believe, powerfully reinforce the impression those two examples give. This issue of second jobs is a straw at which a drowning Prime Minister is now clutching in his juvenile quest to find ‘dividing lines’ with the Tories. But Gordon Brown may be onto something here; and before Tory backbenchers dig themselves into the trench in which he hopes to see them, I want to remind the Parliamentary Conservative Party that for serious politicians it isn’t only a matter of whether the public are right, but whether — if they are wrong — there’s any reasonable prospect of changing their minds.