They don’t get it, do they? The rest of us are cutting back, eking out the pennies, turning down the thermostat, buying fish and chips instead of going to Pizza Express, wearing trousers we bought in 2005 while the powers in the land, people funded by our taxes, carry on as if nothing has changed.
From the Palace of Westminster comes the news depressingly predictable that all MPs are to qualify for taxpayer-funded iPads. That, at least, is the recommendation of the House of Commons administration committee, which argues that the introduction of the devices, which cost upwards of £400, will save paperwork and reduce expenditure.
Why am I not convinced? Why do I suspect that MPs will vote themselves new iPads, at a cost of some £250,000 to the taxpayer, but that any consequential savings to the Exchequer will mysteriously evaporate in the Westminster fog?
Wouldn’t it be nice, after the expenses scandal in the last Parliament, if our legislators had the decency to run a tight ship and, if they want iPad-style gizmos (hardly essential for a backbench MP from Chuntering-under-Influence), meet the costs from their own pockets?
It is not only politicians who have spectacularly misread the public mood.
The BBC newsreader Jane Hill, who is paid an estimated £80,000 to £100,000 a year, has let it be known in a magazine article that she thinks she is entitled to a clothes allowance.
What planet is she living on? Doesn’t she realise that, in the present economic climate, the biggest priority at the BBC is cutting costs?
Whatever force there may be in her argument that women newsreaders need to spend more on clothes than their male counterparts, this is not the time for fripperies.
I must have watched Hill read the news hundreds of times. She has informed me about wars and hurricanes and cabinet reshuffles. She has recited the football scores and handed over to the weather man. But I have never noticed what she is wearing or experienced a burning desire to see her in a different dress. She is a newsreader, for heaven’s sake, not the Duchess of Cambridge at a film premiere.
If she really feels discriminated against at the BBC, an under-remunerated clothes horse, she should quit her job tomorrow. There would be no shortage of able replacements, wearing clothes they had happily paid for themselves.
As with the MPs and their iPads, Hill’s demand for a clothes allowance is symptomatic of one of the besetting problems with our public sector.
Workers on the public payroll and they include some of the best and most altruistic people in the country develop a mindset in which an entitlement to the perks of the job is integral.
I know I used to have that mindset. As a parliamentary official in the early 1990s, I found myself accompanying a House of Commons committee on a fact-finding trip to the Caribbean. There were problems in the banana market and, naturally, MPs wanted to check out the bananas for themselves.
“Of course, you’ll need a tropical suit,” said my boss, a Sir Humphrey Appleby figure. “You can’t be expected to pay for one yourself. You’re travelling abroad on work.”
So off I trotted to a flash Piccadilly tailor, where I got kitted out in a natty pale blue suit, for which the taxpayer was billed £170 quite a sum in those days.
Somewhere deep down, I felt vaguely sheepish about the expenditure. Couldn’t I just have made do with my normal lightweight summer suit?
But I went with the flow, the way most people would have done in the same circumstances. When you are on the gravy train, you live by gravy train rules.
However, I am not sure that going with the flow is good enough in the present climate. The public anger that has vented itself on million-pound bonuses is so combustible that it is as likely to be inflamed by small extravagances as big ones.
Savvy MPs should make do with battered laptops, just as savvy newsreaders should sport the fashions of 2009 or 2010. If they do, they will acquire something far more precious than our money our respect.
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