She was not the only one found cheating the taxpayer whose money finances parliaments. There had been an application under the Freedom of Information Act for details of MPs’ expenses. Speaker Michael Martin tried to fight the request and took it to a court and lost the case. That was bad enough. Parliament said it would release the details in July 2009 — that is, after MPs had gone into recess. That was the second offence for a government which has taken to snooping on any and all activities of citizens on the excuse of countering terrorism. It was hiding its own secrets.

Then in a fine piece of old fashioned journalism The Daily Telegraph obtained a disc with all the expenses details. They paid for the stolen disc, but the revelations were so dramatic that no one has yet taken the newspaper to court. The disc showed that MPs were determined to claim as much as the rules would allow. MPs are allowed “reasonable” expenses for carrying out their work. They took “reasonable” to mean the maximum amount.

No one’s grocery list looks good in broad daylight. Claiming 89p for a bath plug or £1.25 for a bar of chocolate did not show good sense on the part of the claimants. But there were also large sums — for an artificial duck house in the middle of a lake for the MP’s ducks threatened by foxes, a moat around the MP’s castle which needed repair, three high definition TVs and five beds for a three bedroom flat and the final straw was a claim for £15,000 for a servant’s quarter by a Tory grandee. Small as well as large claims insulted people’s common sense. Being within the rules was no excuse. The voters were offended that the rules were devised by the MPs themselves and they wished to be judge and jury.

... contd.