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EXPENSES RULES ARE NOT RIGHT

Disgraced Tory MP Derek Conway

Friday November 6,2009

By Frederick Forsyth

I NEVER thought it would come to this but I am beginning to sympathise with MPs. No, not the tawdry embezzlers exposed since May but two other categories.

The “Simon Pures” of that 647-member House, who charged us not a penny and whose expenses against the taxpayer were listed year after year as £0.

Credit to them at least: massive temptation on offer but they did not fall.

And the newcomers, up to 350 of them, who will be with us the day after the coming election and who are alsoclean. For I think Sir Christopher Kelly has been too harsh in two areas.

He has rightly said MPs with a constituency reachable by a reasonable commute need no resting pad in London for those Monday- Thursday stints when the House is sitting. But he has drawn too large a circle.

He says “one hour” but means one hour by fast train: London terminus to local station. Actually that is almost two hours door to door. That works if you rise from your London desk on the dot of five to be home at seven. But many MPs, especially when they hold office (ie up to 100) can never leave at five and would often be home not much before midnight. The M25 orbital motorway would have been a reasonable radius for an hour in tube, bus or car during both morning and evening rush hour.

This ruling favours wealthy MPs who can afford a London pied-a-terre off their town tab. But poorer MPs with a constituency station 59 minutes from Euston, Paddington, Liverpool Street or Victoria will have to be up to four
hours a day in transit. That is too much.

And the ban on any relatives at all, including wives, being constituency secretary is unfair.

Many wives were once secre taries and damn good ones. Why are constituents ill-served if Mrs MP is there to take the calls, answer the mail, craft the letters and pick up the phone? Living in with the MP, turning the spare bed-room when the kids have flown into the office would actually save taxpayers the cost of office rental.

I think this all started with the wretched Derek Conway shovelling our money into his student sons’ pockets as “researchers” when they were hundreds of miles away.

Now the many innocents are being punished for the sins of a small minority. Surely there must be a compromise that can distinguish between hardworking wife-cum-secretary and shameless rogue?

On these two, think again Sir Christopher.