The Trough Fever Pandemic

Of all the historical precedents of the last few days here in London, my favourite is the Sun newspaper quoting Oliver Cromwell, verbatim, asking for the Speaker of Parliament to "In the name of God, go!" This was a tabloid newspaper that usually runs editorials of one syllable, writing in 300-year-old English.

There have been other historical precedents as well. Today for the first time since Cromwell, the Speaker did go. It's been a good week for the papers.

The British media machine follows a well-oiled production line, with various programmes such as the Today Programme in the morning on Radio 4 and Newsnight in the evening on BBC2 setting what insiders call the News Agenda. In a separate parallel world in this past week the popular tabloids have been running continuous front page news about somebody called Jordan whose name is not Jordan splitting up with someone whose name is Peter or Andre or something. Apparently they met on a game show where vaguely famous people eat insects, and one of them has abnormally large breasts.

At first the epidemic of trough fever that swept through the media looked like a re-run of the recent newspaper pandemic of Swine Flu. A couple of isolated cases of an apparently contagious condition usually more prevalent in developing countries. Although this particular illness was entirely home grown.

The first case was diagnosed when the Home Secretary accidentally claimed expenses for a dirty video rented by her husband. I'm a bit hazy about the fees office guidelines on these matters, but one could argue that this was a necessary expense incurred by the MP being away from home. However she was quick to send her unhappy husband in front of the news cameras to apologise for what was one letter away from state subsidised banking.

In retrospect that particular case seems like a mild sniffle.

Then the influential "This Week" programme (BBC1, Thursdays at 11:40 whenever Parliament is sitting) picked up the story that there were likely to be many more expenses revelations in the pipeline, with rumours of a detailed list being hawked around Fleet Street. Sure enough, the Daily Telegraph broadsheet started to publish just such a list, starting last week. The print media suddenly didn't look so outdated.

A mood of sudden indignation swept the nation. "We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality," as a chap called Thomas Macaulay wrote some 175 years ago. This periodical fit was very much on view at last week's Question Time (BBC1, Thursdays at 10:40) when a number of MPs, some of the quite respectable, found themselves on the panel and in front of an audience of grim looking Northern folk in the appropriately named town of Grimsby. Grim but by no means silent as each of the MPs in turn was booed and heckled as they tried to explain their actions and the features of "The System" that led them to trip up so badly.

What emerged, from this and other encounters, was a sorry tale of not one but several different strains of trough fever. There were people who had broken the law, people who had not broken the law but had transgressed the rather vague rules for Parliamentary expenses, and people who had transgressed neither but were seen to be morally wanting in the cold light of day. Was it really reasonable to claim expenses for light bulbs, lawn mowing, loo seats from the public purse (and that's just the letter L) when most of us have to buy our own? Even from just the first couple of days of expenses revelations there was enough weirdness that people were in no mood to distinguish between the toilet seats (quite reasonable if you've ever tried sitting without one) to mock Tudor beams (for the same unfortunate Mr Prescott). Perhaps the one expense claim that really captured the mood was the Conservative MP (conveniently local to Grimsby) who put in a claim for repairs to his moat. Well, an Englishman's second home is his castle, so who wouldn't want to patch up the drawbridge in between Viking raids? Suddenly Parliament appeared to be epochally out of touch.

So, was this story as significant as it seemed, or was it simply a perfect media storm (to switch metaphors mid-stream)? Was any of this new, or hadn't we known all along that Members of Parliament lived a different and altogether loftier life than the rest of us, even those of them who come from humble working class roots? Incidentally you need only compare the details of the expenses to work out what class the MPs are from in this otherwise classless society. Mock Tudor beams? Working class (with a flat a and a flat 'at); moat? Definitely a toff. The Liberal Democrats seem to have covered the middle ground with middle class misdemeanours where random receipts were bunged into the accounts department for fluffy dusters, lavatory rolls and chocolate HobNobs (cookies, for our American readers).

Actually you should look at the conservative list in more detail - it reads like a copy of Home and Hound or whatever it is the upper classes read, with an astonishing number of swimming pool claims (in a country where almost no-one has one), the infamous moat and even repairs to a helipad. And horse manure, which appears to have captured the public imagination.

Stephen Fry, who is a national treasure, gave us a good alternative view of the relative importance of the whole affair, as you can see in the video on the following story:

BBC story with Stephen Fry interview

He has a point: who are the media to throw the first stone flowerpot? However the full list is well worth a read - it's here at the Daily Telegraph's site at:

Telegraph MPs expenses list

It's only part of the way through that you realise that this is not just the bad guys: this list also includes those who have not claimed or have only made small and reasonable claims. It's just that those are well hidden within this alphabetically ordered list.

The list reminds me of a wooden-hulled boat I had once which, when surveyed, had only two or three timbers that did not need to be replaced. All I really owned was the shape of a boat.

And that's what the UK feels like right now, at the end of an eventful week (also known of course as a lifetime) in politics. There is the shape of the Mother of all Parliaments, if we care to replace all the timbers with more exactly like them.

There has been no shortage of punditry on the subject of what to do, ideas and statements from party leaders, the prime minister and everyone else who hasn't been following the Jordan / Andre story, on how best to change the system.

But that's exactly the problem. We have got used to decades of a style of government in which the answer to everything is a system. Schools still the worst in the Western world? Make them do more paperwork. Crime rising on our streets? More forms for the Police to fill in. Whatever the problem bigger government will come up with bigger systems and bigger audit trails to deal with it. To a boy with an axe, everything is a tree; to a parliamentarian everything can be sorted out with a better system. It seems the tree they were sitting on was the only place they never thought to swing that particular axe.

Veteran politician Tony Benn got to the real point before anyone else, as he often does. He is in favour of the system of MPs' expenses for the simple reason that it allows poorer people to stand for office so that we don't just get the people with moats and helipads and plumbing that goes under their tennis courts.

But he also made a much more important point: all MP's expense returns ought to be made freely publicly available, even the light bulbs and fluffy dusters and individual scotch eggs. And their tax returns. Everything, in fact, starting from before they are even elected, so that people actually get to know everything there is to know about their prospective representatives.

And this really is the answer. Information is key to all of this. It was the Freedom of Information act that allowed the expenses details to come out in the first place, and it was the application of that Act that the now-outgoing Speaker had tried to block. Information lay at the heart of the Speaker's previous unforgivable lapse when he allowed Police to search the office of an MP at Westminster, an act as historic as today's ouster of the man himself, though apparently less obviously so to him. It was the sudden outpouring of information that gave the public an unprecedented and detailed view of what lay within our system of Parliament, and we didn't like it. And so it had to change.

And information is all we need to deal with it. Not systems, not thresholds or rules about who can flip what and when.

There has been a lot of talking-up of people abandoning the main parties to vote for fringe parties and independents as though it was the parties themselves that are to blame, when for once the political parties are blameless. It's individuals.

Which is fine because our system of democracy was always designed around individuals, not parties. All we need to do is vote out the ones who are having a free ride at our expense. It doesn't matter whether some system says that this or that thing is legal or not legal, within or without the spirit of the law or anything else. Either we approve of the new tennis court, fluffy duster, Tudor beams and hanging baskets, or we don't. Either we think the person is doing a good job on our behalf and is welcome to the odd chauffered ride, or we feel they can walk down to the corner store to buy their light bulbs like the rest of us. It's really up to us.

Information is power. Whether we use it or not is up to us. If we decide to wait for Westminster to take a lead, to design some new System so we can go back to reading about the girl with the unfeasibly large breasts, then we only have ourselves to blame if the same unsanitary conditions come back and there is another outbreak of trough fever.