On a winter’s evening in early January this year, weak light was streaming through the windows of a restaurant in London’s Mayfair. Sir Stuart Bell, member of parliament for Middlesbrough – one of Britain’s poorest towns – had already started his glass of champagne and was ordering foie gras on brioche. Mid-order, the Labour MP cocked his head towards the young waitress and delivered a quip. “Do you know that when they write that Marie Antoinette said ‘let them eat cake’, it is a misquote?” he asked. “She actually said, ‘let them eat brioche’.”
A few days later, Bell was one of many to find his name in the newspapers as indignation at the privileged lives of Britain’s politicians increased. He got away with just a mention but the metaphorical guillotine was rolled out for transgressors, such as Derek Conway, the Conservative MP caught employing his son – a student living 300 miles from London – as a researcher, handing over nearly £45,000 of public money for little or no work. The Conway scandal was the beginning of an all-out media trawl over MPs’ pay, perks and rarefied lifestyle. For an increasingly cynical British public, which is voting in ever-lower numbers (turnout in the 2005 general election was 61 per cent, down from 71 per cent in 1997 and 83 per cent in 1950), such stories cemented a sense of disenchantment.
Nor was Conway, a self-made man from the north, the only target. In the past three months, an unamused public has learned that the wife of the Speaker spent more than £4,000 on London taxis; that MPs can claim for a stereo and air-conditioning; that they can put the cost of a new £10,000 kitchen on their expenses. Rarely has there been such a widespread agreement with Aesop’s maxim that “we hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office”.
Certainly, the traditions of the House – many older than the building itself – are looking dated. The idea that MPs should never be doubted because they are all “honourable” now seems quaint. The Commons is taking its case to the High Court to prevent MPs’ receipts from being publicised, in a move which has only eroded its reputation further. Getting elected to parliament is not easy. It takes years of leafleting, glad-handing and networking. Once there, however, the job does look like a nice little number at first glance. First there is the salary of £61,820, against the national average of £24,000. Then you have the additional costs allowance, worth £24,006, paid to all MPs with seats outside central London. Some members in districts a Tube ride from Westminster have claimed it.
MPs do not have to provide receipts for claims below £250 and no breakdown of the allowance is disclosed to the public. Moreover, you can employ your spouse, children or even (in the case of Peter Hain, a minister who recently resigned on a different financial matter) your octogenarian mother. There is parking, free of charge, in central London, and for all the polls showing supposed public distrust of politicians – they are down there with journalists at the bottom of the heap – your title carries status and will open doors, or at least get you a good seat at a restaurant.
And then, for those who enjoy high office as a minister of state, there are numerous opportunities to move into the private sector. The “revolving doors” between the House of Commons and private companies have rarely rotated with such velocity. Former ministers such as Tony Blair (with jobs at JP Morgan and Zurich Financial Services, Patricia Hewitt (now at Alliance Boots) and Alan Milburn (hired by PepsiCo) need not worry about a penniless retirement.
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And yet. Defenders of the status quo argue that MPs do not deserve the opprobrium being heaped upon them. They work long hours in public service and for all the lurid headlines about “fingers in the public till” (Daily Mail) or “snouts in the trough” (The Sun), are paid less than senior workers elsewhere. Some may have claimed every penny they are entitled to, but that doesn’t mean they’re unscrupulous, let alone immoral. Conway is one of only a handful of serious cases to have been identified in recent years.
And as the published expenses of MPs show, Westminster is hardly a den of thieves. In many parts of the world the British parliamentary system remains a model for how to conduct politics. But at the heart of the debate over MPs’ probity lies the issue of their pay and whether or not it is high enough. Amid the noise, the facts still speak for themselves. MPs may well be paid nearly three times the average UK salary, in the same ballpark as head teachers’ pay and that of senior civil servants and military officers, but compared with bankers and lawyers, not to mention council heads, the money is paltry. Ron Sandler, the new executive chairman of the nationalised Northern Rock, is paid £1.08m a year. Adam Crozier, chief executive of Royal Mail, is paid £629,000. Gordon Brown, meanwhile, is paid £176,000 to run the country.
Twelve thousand workers in local government are paid more than an MP, according to a recent survey. Even the journalists writing vitriolic stories about Westminster fat cats are, in some cases, on similar salaries.
For years, MPs were encouraged to treat the additional costs allowance as a top-up to their salaries. It was, they agreed, less politically sensitive than an outright salary rise. One MP, who refuses to be named, says a culture has grown up where hundreds of his colleagues use their full expenses. “There has been intense pressure to keep a lid on pay, so allowances have grown instead. Then we have ended up getting into all sorts of trouble. People have got used to just claiming the lot.”
Conway himself asserted that MPs should be paid much more – “eighty to a hundred grand” – a belief shared widely, and across the political spectrum, in the House of Commons. One senior MP, who did not want to be named, complained: “A trainee at Freshfields, aged 24, starts out on 65 grand. You join McKinsey and you would probably be on something similar by 25.”
There will always be people drawn to parliament by prestige and power. But why would anyone take on a job with such bizarre hours, media scrutiny and unpredictable nature – and for so little? What kind of person becomes a British politician?
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David Laws, 43, bears more than a passing resemblance to Eliot Spitzer. The former banker grew up in Surrey and took a double first at Cambridge. He is the Lib Dems’ spokesman on education and represents Yeovil, a three-hour commute from London. Laws is not doing it for the money, having left a six-figure salary in the City (JP Morgan and BZW) in the 1990s to become a researcher on £14,000 a year. Nor does he fit the stereotype of ruthless ambition; last year he rejected an approach to join the Conservatives, who are favourites to form the next government.
I catch up with him at 9am on a blustery spring Saturday in Ilminster, Somerset. He has just been advising a woman who desperately needs £10,000 of treatment that is not available on the NHS. Now he is listening to a grey-haired woman who believes her 97-year-old father is not getting a fair deal on a new boiler. Wearing a blue suit, with his hair swept over his high forehead, Laws listens patiently to Mrs Davys for close to half an hour, then dictates a letter to his secretary and wraps up the conversation. “I knew it would be quiet the day you turned up,” he says to me. “Last week, in Chard, we had 20 people.”
The second surgery of the morning is at Crewkerne, a 10-minute drive from Ilminster. Laws’ first constituent is a single mother in Girl Guide uniform who wants to keep her care allowance while training as a nurse. Others include a man convinced that someone has stolen a can of beer from his fridge (”personally I think someone’s trying to mess with my head”); a middle-aged couple furious with the ineptitude of their gas supplier; and overweight parents of an entire family on benefits. In every conversation, Laws is polite, attentive and measured. He marks the end of each talk with an emphatic: “Right! I’ll chase that up.”
Constituents come to Laws for a variety of reasons, but the most common are housing, tax credits and child support. The meetings give him good insight, he says, into how policy generated in the halls of Westminster works in the real world. Because it is a quiet morning, Laws has time to chat about how he ended up in politics – it was his ambition from the age of 13 – and the satisfaction he takes from it. “The markets were great fun but there came a point where you want to live for more than just whether German interest rates are 4 or 4.1 per cent. That is a big thing in the City, but not for 30 years of your life.”
After the session in Crewkerne, grabbing a quick drink in the pub, Laws tells me how he maintains his studied calm in the face of some far-fetched sob stories. “There are rare instances where you have to say, ‘come off it’,” he admits. “But you have to work on the basis that people have got a case and I’m there to represent it. It’s amazing how, even when you are dubious, people often have a case.”
Laws spent the previous day outside in the rain, leading a delegation of elderly locals against the closure of a post office. This afternoon he will look around a youth event, give a speech and then watch a Yeovil football match. The job doesn’t leave him much free time, but he doesn’t complain: “I just fit around the rhythm that you accept as normal. I’m used to spending my Saturdays doing advice centres. I’m doing something that I really enjoy.”
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Alan Duncan, the shadow business secretary, also took a sharp pay cut when he exchanged the life of an oil trader to be elected Conservative member of parliament for Rutland and Melton. “Being an MP is fast becoming demeaning and, although people love to bash us, in the end if they bash on it is the country that will suffer,” he says.
I also chat to Norman Baker, Liberal Democrat MP for North Norfolk, who earned more than £100,000 as partner in a law firm before he entered parliament. Baker has been an outspoken critic of some of the more antiquated aspects of Westminster, such as the lack of disclosure on outside interests. But he argues that MPs from districts with safe margins doing “very little work” are far outnumbered by MPs working “ludicrously hard”.
MPs talk of long journeys between London and the shires, which can put a strain on their families. One admitted to me, with no trace of self-pity, that the incessant travel might have played a role in the break-up of his marriage. It is perhaps unsurprising that so many MPs employ their spouses, legitimately, as secretaries: that’s the only way they’ll see each other during the week.
One Conservative member suggests that £200,000 would be an appropriate salary to attract the brightest members of society into politics. He refuses to be named, however. And a problem with such arguments is that not all MPs could have enjoyed alternative careers as millionaires. Others – trade union officials, lecturers or apparatchiks who have never worked outside a political party – freely admit that they have enjoyed a big jump in pay, as well as status, since entering the House.
Fabian Hamilton, a former taxi driver and graphic designer, is one of the many Labour MPs who never made it to a ministerial post. The 53-year-old admits he is unlikely to get promoted beyond the backbenches. “Are we paid enough?” he ponders. “Before I entered parliament I was on £18,000 a year. It immediately went up to £40,000 a year – it doubled even before the expenses.” The money is good for people running their own business, tradesmen and those doing clerical jobs, he says. But even Hamilton thinks there is a case for raising the pay. It is not enough “if you want people from all walks of life. It is not enough if you want someone from a successful business, or from the City, if you want someone from one of the higher-paid professions.”
Chris Bryant, a backbench Labour MP who played a key role in ousting Tony Blair, worked as a vicar and as head of European affairs for the BBC before running for office. He tells me over lunch that he entered politics after seeing the plight of the poor in Peru. “I could run a campaign, as a vicar, to encourage the use of Fair Trade products, but as a member of parliament you have a chance to change the trade laws with the Peruvians and really make a difference.” He keeps a list of examples of ways in which he has made a difference – one being when he won funding for a drug-rehabilitation centre in Rhondda, his constituency. The week before our lunch, he had been involved with new legislation involving mental health, because it mattered to him: his mother died from alcoholism.
Bryant, who may not deserve his reputation for arrogance, says he “hates” the aspect of the job that leaves him with little privacy. He has seen his personal life splashed over the Sunday newspapers. There have been stalkers. And “living in two places is not easy. I spend every week travelling up and down, we do late nights and I’m up early every morning.”
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For now, the woes of Bryant and his peers are likely to fall on deaf ears. One member of the public recently wrote on the BBC’s political blog that he would rather his MP got on with the job than try to “find a receipt for an armchair”. He wrote “Having seen my local MP’s offices/operation, it’s more Save the Children cake sale on a shoestring than Capitol Hill gravy train. Come on, guys, let’s give our MPs a break.” But more typical comments on the blog use phrases like “privileged elite”, “snouts in the trough” and “fraudulent vermin”.
Fabian Hamilton sounds faintly sorrowful as he describes people’s perceptions of his lifestyle. “The other day I applied for a mortgage, and the adviser asked about my working week. I said I worked 60 to 80 hours a week. He said ’how come? I thought you guys had a nice, easy time.’”
Point taken, and yet a front-bencher complained to me: “I’m usually here until midnight during the week, mugging up on my brief.” Really? “Absolutely, you wouldn’t believe how intensive the job can be.” That evening, after a few pints in the pub, I ran into him heading for Westminster underground station, looking as merry as I felt. The clock on Big Ben was ringing out the time. I counted the bells: 8pm.
Jim Pickard is an FT political correspondent
