So Little At Stake

I love the old joke : "Why are local elections so vicious, bitter and hard fought? Because there is so little at stake".

This is superbly illustrated in that little gem "Election" where Reese Witherspoon's high school election involves enough skullduggery and plotting to fuel a national campaign. Similarly our recent little scandal involving the Tory Member of Parliament Derek Conway produced a prodigious amount of media vitriol all targeted on a truly tenth-division villain. Everybody, from the BBC and "The Times" to the Devil's Kitchen and fellow political bloggers queued up to spray him with industrial-strength excrement from high-pressure hoses.

Admittedly, the utterly venal Conway deserved every ounce of ordure heaped on him. He is in danger of giving shameless crooks a bad name. First, he had employed his wife as his secretary at the taxpayers' expense. Er...OK, this is permitted under British Parliamentary rules, though totally verboten in the US and German legislatures. Lots of MPs employ their spouses as assistants. Then he employed his elder son as a researcher.....er, um, yes, this is still permissible. Then he recruited his younger son, also at taxpayers's expense.....and his elder son's friend (or catamite, if you believe the less charitable scribblers). Sadly, he did not follow the example of the Roman emperor Caligula, who appointed his favourite horse to the Senate. At least the noble animal would have cost the taxpayers much less than the sons and would have been just as useful, seeing as neither son appears to have done a stroke of work during the time they were on the public payroll.

True, Conway had heavy expenses. His sons went to Harrow, one of the most expensive boys' private schools in the land (Around £24,000/$48,000 per year). His daughter went to St Mary's, the top Catholic girls school in Britain, which is at Ascot, 15 miles east of Reading. One of my fellow parishioners, a Cambridge graduate, is a teacher at St Mary's. (I have not yet had a chance to ask if she has met this unsavoury toad.) Like other private schools, it can afford higher salaries than State schools and thus attracts the best teachers. It charges a basic £25,000 ($50,000) per boarding pupil per year and God alone knows how much more if you throw in music lessons, horse riding, school trips, etc.

It makes our highly regarded girls schools in Reading look bargain basement. Abbey School and St Joseph's Convent charge only £8,000 to £11,000 per year, albeit for day pupils, not boarders. Such fees are within the reach of middle class business and professional people, even working class people prepared to make serious sacrifices. As I noted in an earlier post, some Reading state schools are so indescribably awful that one father was prepared to clean toilets at midnight to send his daughter to a private school. But St Mary's pupils mostly come from seriously rich families, both British high society and overseas tycoons and nobility.

As in the case of the CIA traitor Robert Hannsen, who spent some of his Russian gold on Catholic schools for his children, it was good to see even loathsome villains understanding the virtues of Catholic education. But I can't either Harrow or St Marys advertising him as one of their illustrious supporters.

Like Hannsen, Conway provides a superb example of the need to check public servants' lifestyles against their official incomes. His MP salary would have been around £60,000 at a time when he was spending up to £73,000 a year on school fees alone for Harrow and St Mary's. Plainly he could not afforded a cup of tea without a hefty bank loan or extra income. Yet none of his close friends in Parliament seem to have raised any awkward questions about his funding the school fees. Possibly his rich wife coughed up something for her offsprings' schooling, but I doubt that we'll ever see the full accounts.

Once caught, Conway continued to bluster than he had done nothing wrong, that MPs are underpaid and they should receive at least £100,000 a year for their services. No wonder that one blogger was recommending public execution for him and his fellow corrupt MPs, with their rotting corpses left on public display "pour encourager les autres". His punishment so far (10 days suspension from Parliament, plus repaying a few thousand) would not scare a ten year old. He will continue to serve as MP until the next election, drawing his £60K plus expenses plus wife's salary.....

Part of the media interest was inflated by his elder son's louche lifestyle, which makes Liberace look like Bruce Willis. It was a great way to do some genteel gay-bashing under the cover of investigating corruption. But the amount of media venom expended was completely out of proportion to Conway's offence. Admittedly the £100,000 wasted on paying his sons for invisible services is a lot of money for an ordinary British family - around four years' average salary, the size of a typical mortgage. But it is of sub-atomic dimensions compared with the £100 billion squandered on countless futile public projects every year. This somehow fails to excite comparable outrage. As George Orwell said of one monstrous waste of public money in the middle of WW2, once a scandal gets too big it becomes invisible. Conway's predations were imaginable and understandable.

Also, I could not help feeling twinges of unease. After all, I profited pretty well at taxpayers' expense during my civil service career. I was perfectly happy to go on utterly useless courses in various attractive parts of the country, claim all the expenses and freebies going, take a hefty redundancy settlement after a year's total idleness or useless make-work on full pay... Adjusting for inflation, I made considerably more than the Conway clan. If you multiply my loot by that of all my colleagues in similar positions, we made the Conways look like public benefactors. And as the feral media, with their legendary corruption, expense manipulation and grotesquely inflated salaries, they are the least fit people on God's earth to criticise anyone for fiddling money. So much of people's behaviour depends on the surrounding culture of the organisation within which they work.

Also the whole business smears the reputations and the honest value of most ordinary MPs. Some champion extremely unpopular causes, such as the "Guildford Four" who were jailed in 1974 on false charges of IRA terrorist attacks. It took years of patient, dogged, courageous, intelligent and persistent investigating and campaigning by one ordinary London MP to finally win their release in 1989. This was after the MP, an utterly unassuming and gentle family man, had truckloads of vilification thrown at him as an "IRA sympathiser" by our indescribably evil tabloids. The old joke that "in America the accused is innocent until the papers come out the next morning" applies overwhelmingly in Britain.

Some MPs contribute to the national media and add to the merriment of the nation - notably our local Class A buffoon and philanderer Boris Johnson, MP for Henley-on Thames, eight miles east of Reading. Heck, some actually make intelligent comments on politics and other aspects of national life and have a real educational value (even Boris is usually worth reading).

But most MPs are unknown outside their local areas. Their long hours of unspectacular slog, their virtues, failings and minor triumphs seldom make it into the local media, much less the London stage. One of our local MPs has no material ambitions beyond the ability to go fishing on his days off. He runs an office in a small house on Oxford Road, one of the poorer areas of town, and is available to talk on all manner of problems. A parishioner rang him about her campaign to get a physiotherapy pool at the Royal Berkshire Hospital. He said: "Come down in half an hour and I'll have the kettle on." He spent time with her planning the campaign and the pool has been installed.

The local MP is still the one locally accessible person who is perceived as an effective ally of the little guy in battles with national or local bureaucracy. I remember my days in the Social Security office; when an aggrieved claimant threatened to complain to his/her MP, he/she got priority attention. If he/she actually complained to the MP, our manager received a letter on House of Commons headed notepaper from the MP demanding to know what we were doing to this voter. In some cases, the claimant had a genuine grievance. In others, they were unholy pains in the ass, professional complainers, mentally deranged..... It did not matter. Once this letter arrived from the MP, your life was not worth living until you had resolved the case and the manager could write a satisfactory reply to the MP. Of course, the people who did not complain simply slid lower down the pile of files. The squeaky wheel gets the grease.

My favourite was the blind guy who was taught to touch-type at the Department's expense. He then proceeded to bombard the office (and sometimes the MP) with a series of immaculately touch-typed letters complaining about some error in calculating his Social Security. He knew far more about the benefits system than our little 17 year old clerks straight out of school, so it is not surprising that there were occasional errors. On one occasion, I had to go round to his house to grovel on behalf of the Department after some trifling error, the MP's letter inside the file in my briefcase. On one unforgettable day, a file arrived with a huge flag attached "PRIME MINISTER INTERESTED". An unhappy claimant had written direct to the Prime Minister's office, where some minor civil servant had raised the file and passed it via London DSS HQ to Reading. But it raised visions of Margaret Thatcher (it was the early days of her reign) bellowing down the phone at our hapless manager.

As the Devil's Kitchen aptly commented, once the latest European Treaty is passed by Parliament, our MPs will be overpaid regional councillors, less able to defend our interests than a dead dog in the street. It will be a real loss if these often reviled, often flawed, often overpaid, quite often oversexed, but more often devoted and undervalued individuals lose their public function. The media monsters might have to resort to exposing their own flaws, sexual perversions. lies, corruption and financial swindles and that would never do............