Morality plays began in the Middle Ages. They were intended to explain Christian precepts and encourage a mostly illiterate audience to lead a Godly life. Typically, they describe the progress of an Everyman who falls into temptation and then is redeemed.
In modern times it’s our newspapers who stage our morality plays. The press coverage of the expenses scandal in 2009 and 2010 was certainly strong on MPs falling into temptation. There wasn’t much about redemption, though.
I recently wrote a novella about the subject of guilt, and its corrosive effects on memory and personality, and I decided to use the expenses scandal as the locus for these ideas. As I researched it — although I suspect much of it is still as fresh in your minds as it was in mine — I imagined the expenses scandal from the point of view of a Member of Parliament: in this case a rather unexciting (and wholly fictional) backbencher.
I tried to describe someone who has worked tirelessly for his party and his country for most of his life. My imaginary MP made the serious, but understandable error, of claiming expenses that were not reasonable. It has often appeared politically inexpedient for the House of Commons to vote itself a pay rise. The way around the problem has been to increase expense allowances and other benefits. The rules were set out in the ‘Green Book’, and lead to the creation of the so-called ‘John Lewis list’ offering a guide as to what items were acceptable to claim for and how much to claim for them.
All expenses systems, like bonus systems, suffer from creep. They start out as one thing and end up as another. Hands up, the chief executive or finance director who has never accepted or offered ‘corporate’ entertainment. Is corporate entertainment a legitimate use of shareholders, as opposed to taxpayers, money? Surely if the money spent on golf days and boxes at football matches was devoted to giving better value products and services, then all that bonding with one’s customers mightn’t be so necessary?
My fictional MP knows that he is misusing the expenses system. But he doesn’t think he is corrupt. People he respects and admires are claiming for expenses right, left and centre: so why not him too? The most morally defective phrase in our language is: if I don’t do it, somebody else will. Yet that is so often the compass that guides people’s decisions.
It’s a dramatic subject to write about, simply because not everyone is above reproach in such matters, but all of us condemn others when they are found to have overdone it. One has to distinguish the moral lapse from the criminal act. It may be morally suspect to claim expenses for a bar of chocolate or a tin of dog food, but it is not criminal. It is criminal to claim for an expense that was never incurred.
So I don’t think my comparison of the expenses scandal with a mediaeval morality play is entirely frivolous. Moral ambiguity always is engrossing. Maybe it is one way of defining human, as opposed to animal, behaviour. The expenses scandal gave us all of that: newspaper reports that ran from entertaining to sanctimonious. Luckily, we can feel sure that the expenses claims submitted by journalists are in all cases above reproach.
The expenses scandal showed how the mighty can be brought down low, which everybody loves to read about. But I wanted to write a story about how even the humble can be humbled. The scandal also showed us what happens when people who are neither rich nor powerful lose the thing they most treasure, which is their self-respect.
So we owe a big thank-you to our national press. The press coverage ended, for the time being, a financial abuse which in the grand scheme of things was wholly insignificant. Perhaps we should look to the important moral and philosophical benefits of the press campaign? But I suspect that anyone who thinks that politics will be a better place as a result, needs their head examining.
Breakfast at the Hotel Déjà vu, by Paul Torday, is available now.
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