11:42am Tuesday 26th May 2009
By Catherine Cain
When I’m on holiday I do my absolute best to avoid the real world. Newspapers are banned and the only bulletins we watch on TV are of the local variety.
For the last couple of weeks, holed up in deepest Cornwall we have become acquainted with the world’s largest oyster, celebrated the retirement of Britain’s oldest postmistress and waited with baited breath for the latest live broadcast from the Devon County Show.
Before last Wednesday I had no idea that you have to give your sheep a wash and blow dry before exhibiting them or that it was actually possible to write the words “bullock scrotum size assessor” on your CV.
(I should explain that these brave lads take their life in their hands, quite literally, when deciding which young male calves will go on to enjoy a life of studtastic leisure as opposed to ending up on a plate covered in peppercorn sauce.)
Local TV news in the West Country is so much nicer than the sort we generally get at home. For a start, it is genuinely local in that the reporters dare to venture outside the confines of the studio to fairly remote farms, towns and villages throughout their region.
Once there, they tend to talk to groups of charming women who have created the world’s biggest quilt for charity or visit a small-scale zoo where a giant tortoise called Timmy is recovering from emergency surgery to repair a hole in his shell.
It’s all rather restful and uplifting.
Compare that to the local ’knife crime’ news we usually watch in these here parts and I think you’ll agree that both BBC London and its ITV counterpart are blissfully ignorant of anything that happens outside a five-mile radius of the Post Office Tower.
I strongly suspect that they are not even aware that places like Watford exist - unless something particularly nasty involving the sharper elements of a canteen of cutlery has taken place.
Despite the fact that we studiously avoided anything likely to involve national news over the last two weeks, even we couldn’t miss the cascading revelations that a startlingly large proportion of our elected representatives seem to be claiming more in expenses each year than most of us take home in our wage packets.
From floating duck houses modelled on 18th century Swedish originals to Bang & Olufson sound systems (- good to see those MPs endorsing Scandinavian design quality, eh?), and from petrol expenses that could take you twice round the globe in one year to moat clearance, manure, helicopter landing pads and even cans of dog food, it’s gratifying to see how we’ve all been subsidising the already privileged lifestyles of the people who govern us.
They’ve clearly thought long and hard about where our tax money should go, and decided that it should be straight into their pockets!
I was a bit surprised to read one MP, Nadine Dorries, describe the media furore surrounding the expenses crisis as a “McCarthyite witch hunt”.
Er…aren’t you missing the point a bit here, Nadine? After all, the outrage, horror and disgust surrounding Senator McCarthy’s investigations were based firmly on the fact that his victims had done nothing to be ashamed of.
Talking of shame, there has even been anguished bleating that we should all back off in case some MPs are driven to commit suicide.
Well, call me an old cynic, but if the thought of the public finding out how much you’ve been racking up on your expenses claims forms drives you to take such a drastic step, you must have a pretty guilty conscience?
Considering the current economic uncertainty and the fact that thousands of people have recently lost their jobs or face the likely prospect of unemployment, it’s pretty difficult to sympathise with those who appear to have been ‘fiddling’ away while Rome burns.
I was sitting in a tea shop in Helston last week eavesdropping on the conversation of four sprightly elderly ladies on the table next door.
They were furious.
In their lovely rich Cornish accents they roundly denounced all the politicians revealed to have their snouts in the trough and their conversation was peppered with several robust Anglo-Saxon terms that I was quite surprised to hear from the lips of someone who had quite recently had a wash and set while reading the People’s Friend.
“It makes my blood boil,” said one of them. “Here am I, living in my flat, scraping by on that pittance of a pension and then there’s that lot buying new sofas and kitchens for their second homes. I feel like they’ve all had their fingers in my purse.”
I think we all know exactly how she feels - apart from a couple of notable exceptions.
The comments that have angered me most about this unpleasantly venal exploitation of the public pocket came from two most unlikely bedfellows - Stephen Fry and the Archbishop of Canterbury.
The National Treasure’s airy dismissal of the scandal as “a journalistic made-up frenzy", "a tedious, bourgeois obsession" and "not a big deal", proved that having a brain the size of a planet can sometimes interfere with reception when it comes to picking up the messages sent out by the less intellectually gifted and significantly less minted man and woman on the street, while Dr Rowan Williams’ call for an end to what he called the “systematic humiliation” of politicians showed a disturbingly elastic approach to the eighth commandment.
From Saturday morning catechism classes, I dimly recall this went something like: “Thou shalt not steal”.
Now, I quite like the Archbishop of Canterbury. To me, he’s always seemed a reasonable, thoughtful kind of chap. In this instance, however, I reckon that before speaking he really should have meditated a little bit longer on the identity of the real victims in this sorry tale and reminded himself that greed is still one of the seven deadly sins.
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