The bonkers button.......

Last week in politics, somebody pressed the bonkers button.

 

First we had the Mitchell fiasco.

 

It should have been instantly obvious that Mitchell was yesterday the moment he opened his mouth. As a senior public figure you simply can’t behave like this. Had I done so as a senior public official I should have been out in milliseconds. As Chief Whip he needed to carry the respect – even fear – of Tory MPs, so it was plain at the outset he could no longer do his job.

 

So what did Dave do? He had two options. To fire him immediately or to throw his weight and authority behind him.

 

Instead he did absolutely nothing; zilch; bugger-all. What a leader!

 

It was the 1922 Committee that did for him.

 

And another thing. The real villains of the piece were the Police Federation, one of the last dinosaur unions, along with teachers, transport and the public service lot. The Old Bill not only fed the story to the media in the first place (and I daresay somebody took a little bung for his pains), but also leaked the internal inquiry report to the Sun, such is the integrity of the finest police force that money can buy!

 
Then we had the totally fabricated story about Osborne’s train fare. The most cursory evaluation would have shown that this story had no legs. The simple truth is that he and his aide had 2^nd class tickets. There were no seats so they sat in 1^st class and paid the difference.  End of story.

 

Actually, not quite!

 

I am no fan of wee George, mainly because it is patently absurd that anyone in his 30’s, however brilliant, has the experience and ‘bottom’ to hold one of the great offices of state. Apart from which we should congratulate him on going about his business by train. He could have taken his official car at much greater expense. Or an aircraft of the Queen’s Flight, as Blair did so often without comment (and also used Northolt instead of Heathrow for his long-haul trips to avoid mixing with the hoi-polloi).

 

In most places’ he would have been accompanied by police escorts and flashing blue lights. In the EU, he would have travelled by executive jet, with his driver sent on ahead with the Merc or BMW.

 

He should be congratulated for his parsimony, not berated because a nosy hack was not going to let the truth get in the way of the story.

 

Now we have the DT, which is trying to emulate the hysterical style of the Daily Mail, stirring up more nonsense about first-class rail and business-class airfares.

 

So let’s get this in perspective. UK MPs are amongst the worst paid in any democracy – less than Italy, Ireland, Germany and others, never mind Japan where MPs trouser twice what our lot get. Because successive governments have lacked the guts to tackle the issue of pay, they created an ‘expenses’ culture, and here we are!

 

The answer is simple – too simple, perhaps, for the average bureaucrat to understand.

 

All pay should be on the same scales as the Civil Service. This would instantly de-politicise the issue.

 

The PM would be on the same scale as the Cabinet Secretary; Ministers with Permanent Secretaries; MPs with Deputy Secretaries.

 

Expenses? All would get the Civil Service scale. This means fixed daily subsistence allowance for nights spent away from home, mileage allowance  for travel using own car, first-class rail fares on official business, second-class for travel home to work when living more than 40 miles from London, and air fares at the cheapest economy rate.

 

What’s the problem?