In the great row about MPs’ expenses, which big party looks worse so far? It is a difficult question to answer. With the Tories, words like ‘portico’, ‘swimming pool’, ‘moat’, ‘gravel’, ‘Farrow and Ball’, ‘chandelier’ and ‘helipad’ are, as officials put it, ‘unhelpful’. One sees a constant attempt to uphold a certain style of living at the expense of people who cannot afford such living themselves. It looks terrible. On the other hand, Labour seems to be even more stuffed with out-and-out serious cheats. They build illicit property empires, filling dismal flats with unusable barbecues and patio heaters paid for by the Fees Office. Their lives seem irredeemably dreary, without the bonus of rectitude.
At the next election, there will surely be the biggest anti-incumbency vote in history. The longer your experience of Parliament, the less likely the voter is to respect you. If the parties enter the election campaign heedless of this, they will suffer tremendously, losing whichever MPs have behaved badly, as voters, through the power of the internet and careful study of the Daily Telegraph, point out to one another what their local man has been up to. Wouldn’t the leader do well to anticipate this? David Cameron, who has already got well ahead of Gordon Brown in reaction to the disaster, should consider asking all sitting Conservative MPs to offer themselves now for reselection by their constituency associations. Most associations, reasonably enough, would choose the sitting person without a contest. But there would be a significant minority of cases where the wretch would be thrown out, and a more likely winner inserted.
It is constantly asserted that none of this scandal would arise if MPs were paid ‘properly’. But there is no way of assessing what is proper. An MP is, in the strict sense of the word, incomparable. He is not part of a career structure; he has no employer; each MP holds his post at the pleasure of the electorate; a junior MP is paid the same as a senior one because, in their capacity as MPs, all are equal. Therefore it simply makes no sense to argue that they should be equal to head-teachers or airline pilots or anybody. They just aren’t. Nor would it be right, or feasible, as the grander papers like to advocate, to take their pay ‘out of the political arena’ (always a way of increasing it) and have it decided by some independent body. How could the pay of our elected representatives be put beyond argument?
The second problem is that the assumption behind the idea of ‘proper’ pay is that if MPs got quite a lot of money, better people would be attracted to the life. Is there any evidence for this at all? Certainly the history of this country shows no improvement in the quality of MPs as their salaries have risen. Indeed, the relation, if there is one, has been inverse. If you say this, people object: ‘You can’t go back to having only rich people or lunatics.’ I’m not sure that is right. There are now — even after the credit crunch — far more rich people around than ever before, and a great many of them depend, not on inherited wealth, but on a pile they have made, or on a good pension. We have got used to the idea that MPs should start young, but in modern life many of the best things are run by the young retired. Plenty of such people with independent means of, say, £40,000 a year (and, usually, no mortgage) could easily afford to live on the current MP’s salary without all the extra frills which have caused so much trouble. They would be much better backbenchers, because they would not all be chasing after ministerial posts, and they would not have all the agonies experienced by younger men and women trying to bring up children while pursuing a political career. Besides, the claim that life is so terribly hard for an MP on £63,000 a year ignores another enormous change in modern life — the double income. While Douglas Hogg is claiming for his moat from the Fees Office, Lady Hogg is working hard in all sorts of clever financial things. While Barbara Follett is asking for £25,000 to be surrounded by heavies in Soho, husband Ken is writing top thrillers; and so on. Margaret had Denis. Gay MPs have civil partners with respectable professional jobs, and no children to support either. It is all perfectly manageable if you take the trouble to work it out.
But the clinching point is that it is not a good idea to make entry into politics easy for anyone. Many of the most able people who come into it from business, diplomacy, the media etc, prove the most useless because they cannot get used to the sheer fatuity and indignities of democratic parliamentary politics. But that fatuity and those indignities are necessary, even good, parts of the system, because democratic politics must involve the clash of interests, the rage of faction, the exhaustion caused by complaining voters. It is not like a giant corporation or a government department, but like an endless voyage in a leaky boat in frequently stormy seas. Therefore the people who are really good at it are people who like the storm and will go bravely into it pretty much regardless of what the salary is.
What really does shock me is how much some MPs work. I heard Sir Patrick Cormack, for instance, saying that he gets into the office at seven in the morning, and is often there until ten at night. Why? What an unbelievable waste of time! One can have no sympathy at all with backbenchers who do so much. If it is mostly constituency business, it only shows how inefficient they are being and how poorly they are delegating to elected councillors. It is very unlikely nowadays that the work is on the proper scrutiny of legislation. That really does take long hours, but these have now been forbidden by the executive-controlled rules. So all those hours are just symptoms of self-importance. One only hopes that people like Sir Patrick are lying, and that really they sneak off to enjoy the enormous holidays (roughly four months of the year), or to earn money by honest extra-parliamentary methods.
I am writing this column, by the way, in Englefield, the astonishing Victorian palace of Richard Benyon, the Conservative MP for Newbury. Its demesne is so extensive that it encompasses an entire village. Richard assures me that he has never attempted to argue that Englefield is his second home. Many Benyons have been Members of Parliament. The one who built the present house sat in the Commons for 16 years, and never made a speech. Disraeli once asked him to reply to the Loyal Address, and he had to explain that he did not do that sort of thing. No pay, no allowances, no speeches: everyone was happy.
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