Back in 2008 Parliament was rocked by the expenses scandal and the nation looked on in horrified disgust.
The policy under Margaret Thatcher was not to give MPs a pay rise, as this would not sit well with the people, but to remove the limits on expenses to enable honourable – and not so honourable – Members to increase the income that they no doubt believed they richly deserved.
To be fair this also existed outside Parliament and journalists and BBC staffers used fantastic imagination in claiming mouth-watering expenses with little sanction.
On the Greater London Council he who is now Lord Archer actually ran a service filling in expense claims for fellow members of the GLC in exchange for a modest 10% of receipts.
The expenses scandal emerged in 2009
Getty
Within Westminster one of the most egregious areas for dodgy dealing was the second home allowance.
It seemed only fair that if you had to travel from Belfast or Shetland then a daily commute was impractical. What was bonkers was that this applied to all members.
As an outer London MP I could get the tube in or even drive back and forth (free parking was a valued Parliamentary perk) and the fact that I didn’t claim for a second home led me to being called a saint by the Daily Telegraph.
I kept a letter on my office wall for some years in which a constituent from Northolt wrote that he had been perusing the Daily Telegraph list of greedy fiddlers and noted that I could have claimed over £23,000 pa for a second home but I did not. What sort of an idiot are you, he asked?
Incredibly you could live in London, have a paid for property handy for the Palace, get the rent, mortgage and utilities paid for by the state and still claim for a hotel stay with no need for proof.
You could also get a Sky subscription as this was deemed essential for our public duties. It seems almost unbelievable now but some MPs actually ended up owning very desirable properties in the SW1 area after the mortgage had been claimed and paid off. Things are very different now.
LATEST MEMBERSHIP OPINION:
Rachel Reeves bought a bottle of champagne for a junior banking colleague on expenses which they claimed was never receivedGetty/PAIf you are making the journey from the far north then you can claim for a reasonably priced hotel room and by and large this system seems to work.
The days of claiming for moat cleaning (how do you know if your moat is dirty?), helicopter pads and duck houses are long gone and unlamented by those who were sickened by the stench that arose from the old system.
The memory of all this mendacity came flooding back as I staggered back before the tidal wave of opprobrium heaped on Rachel Reeves for expenses which she and two other senior officers at HBOS signed off when she worked there.
Reading the details I looked in vain for details of luxurious self-indulgences, riotous entertainment, five-star holidays or goodies beyond the dreams of avarice.
What do you find? Between fifteen and twenty years ago she and two other officers signed off a scheme approved by the bank, board, and shareholders to reward staff as an incentive. Total amount? A few hundred pounds.
Now I don’t often agree with Daily Mail columnist Dan Hodges, despite teaching his son how to take corner kicks when he was left with his grandmother; a famous Labour MP with an office on the same corridor as me.
But when he asked what on earth the fuss was about when the sums were so small and were properly accounted for and never the subject of any complaint of comment when she left the bank all those years ago then surely fair play demands that we write this one off as a pathetic attempt by the BBC to draw attention from the reeking scandals that infect that bloated corporation.
Caliban, in The Tempest, reacts with rage when he sees his face in a mirror for the first time. The rage of Caliban is a fitting description of the two-faced hypocrisy of the BBC who are trying to make something out of nothing while ignoring their own manifest shortcomings.