Ten years since the MPs’ expenses scandal, one thing is clear – it paved the way for Brexit

Born of the same feeling of dissatisfaction and neglect that gave us the 2016 EU referendum, we’re still guiltily projecting moral failures of our own onto MPs, vilifying them for human frailties we are all prone to

The damage has been cancerous, if you think about how our politics has evolved since (Getty)

Do you remember the duck house?

Rightly, it has become the abiding symbol of the parliamentary expenses scandal. This was a story that broke a decade ago: it had then, and has even today, a corrosive effect on the public’s view of our elected representatives, and democracy itself.

The floating – no less – elegant lodgings for domestic fowl that Sir Peter Viggers, the honourable member for Gosport, had installed in his garden pond said it all.

Here we had an MP, living in presumably comfortable surroundings, possibly in two homes, with all the prestige that goes with his post, a knighthood, a decent salary, virtually a job for life in a safe Tory seat, legislating for a nation which even then had a scandalous number of homeless people.

And he had the audacity to expect the taxpayer to stump up for a well-appointed pad for his pet ducks. Some five foot tall (the duck house, not Sir Peter) and modelled on an 18th century Swedish mansion, the duck house was later auctioned off for £1,700, the proceeds given to the Macmillan cancer charity.

Living on Duck Island, I don’t suppose the waterfowl gave a flying duck what the rest of the world thought, but Sir Peter had to. The then Tory leader of the opposition David Cameron, with an eye on the impending general election, was so incensed that he demanded Sir Peter immediately announce his intention to stand down.

Caroline Dinenage (daughter of 1970s children’s TV personality Fred “How!” Dinenage – I am not making this up), was duly elected the MP in 2010. She is another Tory, which demonstrates, perhaps, the limits of the voters’ anger.

It was odd, though, the anger. For politicians have never enjoyed much of a reputation for truth, probity and honesty. There was an old joke in America – “please don’t tell my mother I’m a politician, she thinks I play the piano in a brothel”.

In the opinion polls, politicians routinely finished somewhere at the bottom of the poll, usually ranked between estate agents and, erm, journalists. For all the fuss, the MPs’ expenses scandal – duck houses, flipping second homes, moat cleaning bills, claims for a sink plug – were not so much revelatory as merely confirming in the voters’ minds what an awful, greedy, lying bunch they were.

There was little distinction drawn between those who merely followed admittedly rather generous rules – including the “John Lewis list” for domestic stuff – those who stretched a point, and the downright illegal. In the event, “only” four parliamentarians were successfully prosecuted. Most “got away with it”.

Still, it did further corrode faith and politics. It did, in its way, add to that inchoate but powerful feeling of dissatisfaction and neglect that eventually gave us the Brexit result in the 2016 referendum – though stagnant living standards and austerity had much more to do with it.

It became that much easier for the likes of Nigel Farage to attack “career politicians”, though of course he is one such who, I presume, takes his salary and allowances as is his entitlement, from the European parliament, where he is such an adornment.

Today, the expenses scandal is sometimes bundled up, illogically, with the votes in the Commons about the EU, as evidence of “Brexit betrayal” being perpetrated by a self-regarding, “preening”, elite inside the Westminster bubble, insulated by their lavish lifestyles from the realities of life in, say, Sunderland or Blackpool.

It is all too easy a caricature to draw, and the boys and girls who made millions on their second homes are mostly still in the Commons voting on the future of people who could only dream of owning one home, let alone two, three or more.

The damage, thus, has been cancerous, if you think about how our politics has evolved since – coinciding in particular with the rise of social media, where any idiot with a smartphone or some blogging software had become a publisher, naturally outside “the mainstream” media.

For what has happened has not been seen since the 1930s in any widespread sense: scepticism about the party system and the cynical ways of politicians – all perfectly normal and healthy – shading into a loss of faith in democracy as system of government.

It was exactly how the British Union of Fascists and Mosley tried to traduce Westminster – a useless, corrupt “talking shop”, unable to deal with the economic crisis before it. It needed to be replaced by the “will of the people”. There are eerie echoes of that now.

That, I think, is unhealthy and it is why the likes of “Tommy Robinson”, real name Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, has become a national figure.

I still find it a bit hypocritical, however – the degree of hysteria and how huge a story it became. Sitting in a newspaper office – and it was a newspaper, The Daily Telegraph that gave us the grimly comic details – I did feel it a bit bizarre that journalists should get quite so hyperventilated about excesses and dodgy expenses claims.

I have seen enough of those over the years to realise that MPs were not the only people out there on the fiddle, gaming the system and trying to pull a fast one.

Indeed in many a job in the old Fleet Street, “exes” were, in effect, informal second salaries, paid out NI- and tax-free for both sides with only the most cursory examination.

Many a hack was expected to utilise their “expenses allowance” to the hilt, and faulted for not doing so. I believe some of these habits persist to this day.

And what of the indignant public? Did they never cheat? Did they never claim for some expense of benefit or tax allowance that they might not, on a strict interpretation, qualify for? Did they never game the system at work? Did they volunteer to the taxman all of the income all of the time? Did they never pay a builder or a garage cash, no receipt?

It seems to me that that we were then, and still today, guiltily projecting onto our MPs moral failures of our own, vilifying them for human frailties we were all prone to.

That, though, is the occupational hazard of the politician, along with the invasions of privacy, racial and other abuse and, these days for female MPs, rape threats and the possibility of assassination.

Many years ago an entertaining Tory MP and wit, Julian Critchley, now forgotten, offered the view that, such is the moral sense of the British voter, the only safe vice for a member of parliament is a bag of boiled sweets.

Indeed so: we do set them higher standards than anyone else. Our MPs then were flawed, as they are now, and always will be. As are the rest of us – including journalists, and voters. Perhaps, like in Thailand, we should encourage large embedded colonies of Buddhist monks to offer a moral example to communities – though Thailand itself is no stranger to corruption. The monks wouldn’t be allowed expenses, of course, and would pay for their own robes.

We should at least admit that, faced with an apparent perfectly legal and routine opportunity to go out and buy a central London flat and then fit it out at John Lewis, all on the taxpayer, we would probably have gone for it. I know I would. Like Sir Peter, my ducks – Daffy, Donald and Disco – deserve only the best.