Take it from a former MP – popular outrage is wrecking parliament

Paradoxical I know, but I must first explain that there’s little point in my writing this, and somebody else should.

Paradoxical I know, but I must first explain that there’s little point in my writing this, and somebody else should.

The column it’s futile for me to write sounds a warning about the mess we’re making of MPs’ pay and allowances; and the danger not only that we discourage capable men and women from considering a political career, but that we relegate the status of politics and its practitioners in a way that may reverberate through generations to come. The Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (IPSA), paralysed by the hysteria over MPs’ expenses that gave birth to it, is behaving with bone-headed insensitivity.

So why am I the wrong man to write this? Because I was an MP. Readers refuse to accept that I’m a disinterested party. Every time, in the Times, that I’ve so much as hinted that the popular indignation engulfing Westminster before the last election was an overreaction to a real but complicatedly driven abuse, I’ve been met (in online readers’ commentaries) with the sneer that I would say that, wouldn’t I, former Tory MP that I am? Even when on the radio I’ve stuck up for former Labour members like Dr Ian Gibson, hounded from politics because he let his daughter share his flat, the callers’ responses have been the same: ‘Snouts in the trough… you MPs are all on the same side…’

Well I’m not an MP, and haven’t been for a quarter of a century. The ruses some modern parliamentarians disgracefully exploited to inflate their expenses weren’t even available in 1979. As a journalist now my interest lies in joining the MP-bashing bandwagon.