MPs' EXPENSES (2)

There has been a lot of talk in the U.K. press this weekend about how David Laws is an "honourable man" with oodles of "integrity". I have to say I think he is more than a bit of a dork.

A former banker, Mr. Laws is the economic brains of the Liberal Democrats and one of the main architects of the coalition agreement that has propelled his party into Government for the first time in more than a generation. His reward was to be made Chief Secretary to the Treasury, in effect deputy Finance Minister to the Conservative Chancellor George Osborne. The Chief Secretary's job is to control public spending by other Ministers, and so is a difficult one at the best of times. Since this government will have to make huge cuts in public spending, starting immediately, the job is even harder than normal.

However, it will not be Mr. Laws who will be doing it. After just 18 days in office, he resigned. It transpired that he had claimed up to £40,000 in expenses (paid for by the taxpayer) for renting a room in London while he attended Parliament. The problem was that the room was in a property owned by his partner of the past 9 years, James Lundie. Under the rules, that is not allowed.

Mr. Laws says that he never considered Mr. Lundie to be his partner, in part because they did not share bank accounts. This is unconvincing; I have been married to my wife for nearly 20 years, and we do not share bank accounts. He also said that he wanted to protect their privacy and not reveal his own sexuality (nether family nor friends knew of the relationship). Again, this is unconvincing. The easiest way to do that would be not to have made a claim. Mr. Laws - in effect - agrees that these reasons are unconvincing, since he has resigned, will be paying the money back, and has asked the Parliamentary Standards Commissioner to investigate. As he himself put it, he can't escape the conclusion that what he did was "in some way wrong".

Exactly how wrong must await the outcome of that investigation. But that is not what makes Mr. Laws a dork, it is something else. Every politician in the U.K. - indeed, every voter - has known for at least a year that the system of claiming for Parliamentary expenses was rotten. Nearly everybody in Parliament was affected, a large number of the biggest culprits were forced to stand down before the recent general election, five of the worst offenders were prosecuted. If there was even the tiniest doubt about the legitimacy or otherwise of Mr. Laws' actions - or even if there wasn't - then the time to have put his cards on the table was then. He might have run into trouble, he might not (others did things that were far worse). But at least the electorate, both local and national, would have known where he stood. And he would not have ended up in the position where people affected by his decisions to cut public expenditure could reply "why can't I get money from the state when you can?". Forget everything about privacy and sexuality, this was a colossal political misjudgement.

Nick Clegg promised that the Liberal Democrats represented a new kind of politics. Mr. Laws has succinctly demonstrated that they don't. If I were Mr. Clegg, I would be furious (despite his protestations of support). And more than a little worried. If he didn't know what one of his closest associates had been doing, then what else doesn't he know? That question might well gnaw more than usual, given that the original revelations came not from Mr. Laws himself but from the Daily Telegraph. The right-wing newspaper has been the honourable champion behind the expenses revelations, but it is also undoubtedly a supporter of "the Conservatives should rule alone" mentality. Will there now be a dripfeed of revelations about other politicians in order to put the coalition under pressure?

Walter Blotscher