Who'd be a politician?

For a short period in time, me.

At the height of the MPs expenses scandal in 2009, I did consider becoming an MP. I considered it for about two weeks. On the face of it, initially, the idea had very few drawbacks. It certainly seemed the best chance I was going to have to earn above £60 000 a year, and, let's face it, what do they actually do anyway?

Since Parliament began, there has always been scandals and sordid little (and not so little) stories about individual Members of Parliament. In the 1890s there was the Balfour affair, in the early 20th Century there was insider trading within the Liberal Government. Some scandals were bigger than others; the Profumo affair of 1963 threatened to bring down the Macmillan Government. In the 1970s, Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe was tried for conspiracy to murder his homosexual lover, and in the 80s there was Cecil Parkinson's infidelity with his secretary. All of the major parties have been hit by scandals of various natures.

Most of these cases involved one or two, at most a handful, of individual members. The establishment, the press and the public were content to believe that as an institution, Parliament was not corrupt or suffering from moral turpitude.

The story of expenses in 2009 changed all of that. For the first time, there was a credible account of mass corruption, malfeasance and dishonesty that affected virtually all of the 650 members of Parliament. For what seemed like months on end, the Daily Telegraph published lists of expenses claimed by politicians for such surreal items as a floating duck house. The (then) Leader of the Opposition David Cameron claimed for clearing wisteria from his property. Some went so far as to claim mortgage interest payments for houses they didn't have mortgages for, or didn't even live in. The then Home Secretary Jaqui Smith came under the spotlight for allegedly claiming that her main residence was a house in London owned by her sister, so that she could claim allowances on her family home in Redditch. It later transpired that a claim had been submitted for an adult movie that her husband had watched.

Expenses scandals themselves were nothing new. Newly published documents show that shortly after her election victory in 1979, Mrs Thatcher claimed for an ironing board at Number 10 which she subsequently had to pay for herself. What changed in 2009 was the sheer scale of the numbers of people involved.

It would be a huge understatement to say that the publics opinion of their representatives had never been lower. They were portrayed in most sections of the media as having their noses squarely in the trough, caricatured as such as pigs or parasites.

Normally, if one is to seek election in a local constituency, it is vital to seek and receive the support of the local major political party. Without this support in terms of finance and publicity, it is very difficult to campaign effectively. In most constituencies in the UK, the predominant party is related to the socioeconomic profile of the people living there. In some places, it would be almost possible to get a mannequin elected provided it had the right party colours. There are times when this changes, usually at times of national change where there is a "swing" from one party to the other, such as 1997 where a slim Conservative majority was turned into a Labour landslide with a huge swing from Conservative to Labour. This large swing to Labour gradually eroded during the 2000s to the point where the Labour majority in the 2005 General Election was much smaller than it had been.

In 2009 though, with an election less than a year away, all of this was now uncertain. The "rules" such as they were seemed to have been discarded. It looked entirely possible that established, "career politicians" would be booted out en masse and replaced with a host of independent candidates elected on a pledge of cleaning up the system and eradicating this system which was by general agreement, in tatters. There were even some pundits in the media who were warning in advance that to replace "proper" politicians with "ordinary" people would be a bad thing, reducing the quality of debate and legislation passed as a result.

I gave enough consideration to the idea of becoming an MP to realise that I would not have sufficient time or money to campaign whilst holding down my current job, and neither did I really relish spending most of my time living in London. I discussed it with my wife and we collectively agreed that it was probably not a good plan, and we left it at that.

Looking back, 2 1/2 years later, I'm glad that I did.  Because apart from the reasons mentioned above, I've come to realise that it's a position where you really can't win (even when you do win) and the very fact that you are there makes you eligible for the worst sort of scrutiny as well as the good kind, the kind that we should all expect of our representatives. I mean that whatever course of action one takes for a given situation, there will always be a group of people somewhere, and usually it's the Daily Mail, who question your sanity, your competence, your ethics and your morality, and sometimes all simultaneously. Some time ago, the public lost all trust in their elected representatives, even though they elected them. This was long before the expenses scandal and will probably carry on for a long time to come.

This isn't surprising; it's virtually impossible for us, remote from the situation and most of the relevant facts, to distinguish between a Manifesto promise made in good faith but overtaken by the pragmatic choices required once in office, and the cynical pledge made to gain popularity but which never really had any prospect of being enacted. The current Liberal Democrats have found themselves caught by a trap of their own making. They could say pretty much what they wanted in their Manifesto; there wasn't a snowflake in Hell's chance of them being elected. Was this a cynical attempt to gain popularity and share of the vote, or was it the earnest expression of their values? Who can really answer that question? I can't. What we can say for sure is that they did promise things which now that they have a share of places at the top table of the Cabinet, the practicalities mean that they are unable to deliver on such things as the abolition of student fees. There are two main reasons why this is currently unrealistic for them; the current state of the British economy and the fact that this is idealistically abhorrent to the "real" governing party, the Conservatives. The Liberal Democrats now find themselves in the position of having all the responsibility for the Governments actions but little effective authority to change or control any of it. The bedrock support for the party has been seriously eroded, especially in the student populous which was hoping to benefit from the abolition of fees. This section of society has seen it as a broken promise, a betrayal of the worst kind. As is often the case, their view of the world polarised through idealism into black and white, blinding them to the more pragmatic shades of grey.

This polarisation is not at all a uniquely British phenomenon. Over in the US, the trail to the election in November has already begun. Barack Obama, overwhemingly elected in 2008, is attracting all kinds of vitriol from all sides, even those who voted for him. I'm no expert on American politics, but it seems to me that there is one crucial difference between the UK and US systems; here, the majority party rules and their leader becomes Prime Minister. Hence the Government of the day gets to create policy and new initiatives and legislation and doesn't usually have a problem getting it approved because they hold the majority. In the US of course, you can have a Democratic President and a system where the majority is Republican. The President can propose, cajole and suggest all he wants; if the Majority party disagrees, then it doesn't get approved. Under these circumstances it seems to me to be a little unfair to blame the President for either a) not passing legislation on those things he promised or b) the results of anything that was passed by the House of Representatives or Congress.

Similarly the expenses scandal was not quite as black and white as most of the media portrayed it. The simple fact is this; like any other expenses system that you or I have ever worked with, there was a book of rules or guidelines as to what could be claimed, and what could not. This should have informed the individual MPs what to submit claims for. The claims are then passed to a group of people responsible for inspecting, auditing and authorising those claims. Only once the submitted claim had been authorised would any monies be reimbursed. I heard very little, if anything, about the robustness of any system that could allow a claim for a duck house to be checked and then approved, or even who approved it. Of course, it is true that the people concerned appear to have bypassed the section of their brains handling common sense and shame. They should have had a sense of what was reasonable and what wasn't. I wouldn't consider claiming garden maintenance or cleaning of my swimming pool (if I had one) on my work expenses. However the point remains that if the system was working correctly, such claims would have rightly been thrown out without a penny paid. It's good that more than one former MP has been imprisoned for "irregularities" in their accounting and expenses. What's odd though is that there's little clear reason as to why some members were prosecuted and convicted and why some were simply allowed to repay what had been claimed for and paid to them.

So am I saying that I now feel sorry for politicians? No, not for a moment. Politicians are still a privileged breed. Yes they come in for some stick at times, and those at the very top have to make literally life or death decisions. For the most part though, the majority of MPs don't really do all that much for their money. As mentioned at the top of the article, they get in excess of £60k per year, claim expenses on things that you or I would have to pay for themselves, a huge pension and even if they lose their seat, a whopping "resettlement" allowance to get them back on their feet again, the poor dears.

Have a look at the blog of "Guido Fawkes" here to see some of the things that are still going on. For example, their gourmet lunches served in Parliament which are subsidised by the taxpayer to the tune of 50%. Not only are they subsidised by us, if you or I visited Westminster today and ordered the same dishes, we would pay up to twice as much!

And they wonder why nobody trusts them? Beats me....