Afternoon:
10°c
The devil, as a wise man said, is in the detail. "Two Bogs" and his splintering toilet seats; Shaun Woodward and his £1.06 Asda pizza; the junior minister's Jaffa Cakes; the Welshman's chocolate Santa; the mole-killing and the manure; the bath-robes and the piano-tuners on, gloriously, it goes.
We're told by political insiders that this sort of trivia distracts us from the real issues.
Isn't it petty, they say, to be talking about broken bog-seats when we're trying to mend a broken society? Fine time to come over all high-minded! I'm not the one who spends my time keeping track of receipts for ginger biscuits.
Petty is spending £150,000 of our money suing to exempt yourself from your own legislation. Petty is a millionaire asking the public to pay for his Crunch Corner Yoghurt. Petty is operating in a system that exempts you from the letter of the law because you're expected to abide by its spirit, and then gouging it for every minibar Kit-Kat you can stuff in your stupid gob.
Lord Mandelson has described the expenses row as "classic smear tactics". That's not quite right. A "smear" is an untruth designed to discredit someone - a good example would be the malicious gossip Lord M's old apprentice Derek Draper was caught preparing to spread. A key thing about the leaked particulars of MPs' expenses claims, you see, is that they are true. Look it up, dear!
The pompous thing that is constantly said about MPs - usually by MPs - is that "nobody goes into it for the money". Sure. Most people go into it in order to boss other people about. But the money is what distinguishes politics from other jobs - social workers, nurses or teachers, say - that also might appeal to the public-spirited.
The job begins at £63,000 a year, and goes up in nice fat bumps with preferment. You can pad it out with part-time work, you can pay your wife as a secretary, and the expenses system doesn't bother with receipts for less than £250.
It seems quite reasonable to conclude that many MPs bloody well are in it for the money.
The self-flattering implication of the "not in it for the money" boast is that these are people who, had they not been MPs, would now be earning not three but 33 times the average wage as captains of industry, entrepreneurs and hedge-fund managers.
We have only their own speculation as evidence for that. From where I'm sitting most look like chiselling little party hacks who couldn't get arrested in the private sector, let alone make a fortune.
Asserting their own largeness of spirit, while acting in every way to confirm the opposite, isn't really going to cut it.
• Four years ago, Lord Rogers called Quinlan Terry's plans for the Royal Hospital "architectural plagiarism", putting the project on ice. Terry huffed that this was an "abuse of his position".
Now Terry's supporter Prince Charles is accused of lobbying the Qatari royals to replace Rogers with Terry on the Chelsea Barracks site.
In stamping-butterfly mode, Rogers fans threaten to boycott Prince Charles's speech at RIBA tomorrow in order to defend "our democratic process".
Quinlan's gang hated Richard for running to the grown-ups to spoil his game. Now Richard's gang think Quinlan went running to the grown-ups to spoil his game. Architects rather deserve Prince Charles, don't you think?
JS-P's brand does not travel well
I spent the weekend among my in-laws in the pretty Northumbrian town of Hexham, which is still in the process of recovering from a visit by Janet Street-Porter to its book festival.
Janet's well-honed comic routine - she pretends to be a potty-mouthed old egomaniac - is easily misconstrued outside London.
The Hexham Courant reported that "she told the Courant photographer to 'f**k off now' when he asked her for a second photograph, demanded more wine after criticising the measures, and refused to sign any more books for Cogito [bookshop] because "my dinner will be ready'."
Instead of bursting out laughing, the reporter pronounced her "charmless". Some thanks! Didier Drogba may be the apologising type, but I daresay our Janet will hang tough.
Poetry and priapism ...
It's regrettable that some who oppose Derek Walcott's bid for the Oxford chair of poetry have seen fit to bring up old sexual-harassment accusations.
I don't know the ins-and-outs, so to speak, of the Walcott story. But it does play to a preconception in the public mind. An unvarying feature of the TLS's annual summer party is the poets rutting in the shrubbery... what is it with male poets and priapism?
My theory is this. If you're a poet you make no money, nobody comes to hear you read, nobody flies you to Hollywood, most of your rivals hate you like sin, and if you want someone to blow drugs up your bottom with a straw you'll pretty much have to buy a bendy straw and do it yourself.
The only reason people become poets is because they think it will get them sex.
When they find out that Ken Russell's Gothic wasn't a documentary after all, they become demented with regret, and misunderstandings occur. To understand is to forgive.
Reader views (2)
A chandelier
Two over large for larded arse khazi seats
Murder the trees Aga's, how chique
A bath plug
No partridge in a pear tree. yet?
No name or face in payment paid
A nameless numbered nation
Make payment
Oh how smart your kitchen
Garden, neater than Kew
Ah a swimming pool.…
Tut tut it leaks
No stress the nameless number will pay the plumber
Time so much time
To scribe the shopping list, sod the NHS and other pifling topics
And the honourable members look busy
And the trusting face of Mrs x
Oo No not Mrs x but number million and two
You paid toward a gardener number million and two
And in your meagre front yard the thistles still grow
What will you do number million and two?
Allow a continue
Of a slapped face?
Yes, you will...
Get angry number million and two
Don't forget...Do NOT forget
They hope you will forget
You do not have dementia number million and two
Do not forget
- Midge, London, 11/05/2009 12:35
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Men become poets for sex? Surely there are easier ways of being successful with the ladies/other gents? Footballers seem to do alright. And office workers don't do too shabby. I think poets just don't get out much. They're the computer programmers of the writing world.
- Mark Sullivan, Manchester, 11/05/2009 11:39
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