It was good to see parliamentary expenses back at the top of the news agenda over last weekend. I think we were all getting a little nonced out, so to speak. To judge from the number of lawsuits now filed against the BBC, and also the supposed list of people due to be picked up by the police, it would seem that almost everybody who works in television was guilty, at some time or another, of sexually abusing some innocent civilian. It is surely only a matter of time before we see the headline: ‘Police to interview Pugh, Pugh, Barney McGrew, Cuthbert, Dibble and, of course, Grubb.’ In a strange sort of way the story loses a little of its potency as a consequence; it is less of a shock to find that, say, Leonard Rossiter once got up to no good in a dressing room 40 years ago when you know that the bloke who played Larry the Lamb was hanging out in the gents with the kiddies at the same time.
They were all at it, whatever ‘it’ is supposed to be and, oddly enough, the commentariat is beginning to split on ideological lines as to what to make of it all. This is the first sign that a story is being absorbed and digested in a normal manner, rather than merely staggering us all with its revelations — the old ‘CFM!’ designation (itself a profane forerunner of OMG), as Fleet Street used to describe a sensational gobbet of news. In a sense, the more widespread a thing becomes, so the more diluted its impact, partly because there are too many people upon whom we wish to focus our death rays of hate, loathing and retribution.
Much the same thing happened with MPs expenses, if you remember. A flurry of outrage which later settled down to a brooding annoyance and later still the default ending for all news stories, boredom. You begin with the particular and at this point the story has colour and life; duck houses, porno vids, moats and second homes and the like. Later it becomes general, a litany of grey transgressions, and people lose interest altogether. ‘They’re all at it,’ is what you hear, from that judge of all things, the man on the street — and by then the story is as good as gone, for his mind is closed to the issue. It becomes henceforth a story about the transgression of an institution rather than an example of sulphurous individual wickedness, which is what really excites us.
Perhaps this is why the book was flung at Denis MacShane, the Labour MP for Rotherham; having been out of the news for so long, the expenses story suddenly had import and sensationalism once again. MacShane fiddled his House of Commons expenses, of this there is no doubt, and still less doubt that you picked up the bill for them. Over a number of years he filed fraudulent expenses claims in much the manner a journalist of 20 years ago might have done, with a rough and ready regard for the absolute truth and slightly less for absolute transparency.
MacShane was himself a journalist 20 odd years ago. He was free and easy with his claims and in order to get those claims through he had a supremely dodgy bank account in the name of a company which seems to have existed only in his own mind. He was generous with his team of researchers and assistants to the extent of bunging at least one of them a computer paid for by you and me. He bought eight computers in total, which I would argue is probably seven too many. But all this being said, the claims over a number of years did not add up to that much when compared with previous transgressions we have seen. And — crucially, you might think — the parliamentary committee which kicked him out of the House of Commons for a year concluded that he had not remotely profited personally from his claims, nor sought to. The fact that MacShane was engaged in scurrying all over Europe as a personal envoy for Tony Blair may make us all grimly satisfied at the way his case has turned out, but it does not alter the facts. The police investigated MacShane and the CPS decided against prosecution.
Whereas we have in the Cabinet a minister of state for schools and also a minister for the Cabinet Office who quite clearly did profit from fraudulent expenses claims amounting to a very large sack of dosh indeed. The Liberal Democrat, David Laws, claimed £40,000 in second home costs when he was actually renting a room from his lover, a man called James Lundie. Laws knew that MPs were banned from leasing accommodation from their partners, even if they are gay partners. The committee found, in Laws case, that he had not ‘intended’ to benefit himself or his partner from this convenient arrangement — it just so happened that both of them had benefited after all. That’s a lucky accident, isn’t it? Laws’s excuse was that he did not wish for people to know that he was a homosexual — an odd disposition for a Liberal Democrat. Well, if he hadn’t charged the taxpayer for rent they never would have known, would they?
So Laws is back in Cabinet; MacShane is kicked out of parliament with his career decisively over — and some commentators demanding the CPS revisit their decision not to prosecute. When you look back at the MPs who really copped it over expenses, the ones who their parties’ leaders dealt with most severely, they were the MPs who they considered the most expendable. MacShane was expendable, Laws wasn’t, and that’s about it.
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