From the BBC’s reaction to Alan Duncan’s admittedly fruity comments that MPs had to “live on rations” and were “treated like shit”, you’d think that he’d gone to war with France. One also can’t help but wonder whether, on the day that Mervyn King gave a stark warning about the economy and where unemployment (perhaps including me) reached nearly 2.5million, some Labour lackey hasn’t been storing this one up for a while to feeding to the media at a timely moment.
The point about Alan Duncan is that, to quote Jim Hacker’s chief whip:
“In politics, you have to learn to say things with tact and finesse, you berk.”
I actually agree with Alan Duncan’s sentiment, which I am confident is shared by many in Westminster. They’ve been made scapegoats for an outdated and over-generous system meekly implemented by a lax Fees Office regime. They feel that they only acted within the rules and that a higher standard of self-regulation than they understood to be necessary has been retrospectively applied by the media and public in the face of circumstances that didn’t exist when these claims were made.
There has been a gutful of hypocrisy from journalists whose expenses are equally questionable but not publicly accountable as well as the man in the street, who is happy to criticise in the knowledge that if he could get a second home plus fixtures and fittings on his expenses, he’d jolly well do so.
But until reform is forthcoming, Alan Duncan and others would do well to bite their tongues and keep their self-pity, however justified, to themselves. Particularly when speaking to people who’ve been filmed on You Tube digging silly shapes into their well-manicured lawn.
Pity, pity, pity the poor voters of Buckingham in May 2010. I suppose you could argue that rather than being saddled with Labour luvvie John Bercow masquerading as a Tory as a shoe-in next time, things have slightly looked up for them with the news that UKIP fruitcake Nigel Farage is to break parliamentary tradition and stand against him.
