The gravy train now crashing...

“…an utterly lost and daft system
Which gives a few at fancy prices their fancy lives
While 99 from a hundred who never attend the banquet
Must wash the grease of ages from the knives.”

Louis MacNeice, Autumn Journal, 1938.


WHEN a gravy train crashes off the rails we should really have expected the brown stuff to cover everyone on board.

So it is that our MPs find themselves knee deep in the soft and sticky and the air is thick with the rotten stench of hypocrisy.

OK, so the MPs caught with their fingers in the public till are queuing up to buy hair shirts (probably on expenses).

OK, so they are all wringing their hands in contrition and self-flagellating.

OK, so they are all lining up to drop cheques into the box marked ‘Returns’.

And why would that be, do you think?

Are they really that sorry that the rules they made for themselves are open to abuse?

Do they truly feel shamefaced that they are able to freeload it at our expense?

Or might it be that they are simply highly embarrassed that their lucrative little lucre secret is out in the open and now they are scrambling to salvage any last shred of respect they may once have had.

What they need is the lass who casts a suspicious eye over our exes claims and, believe me, we would be glad to see the back of her, or rather, we would all love her to reach such heights in her career at such an important place as Westminster.

But what a joy it has been to watch first, David Cameron, then Gordon Brown, trying to inhabit the high moral ground – if there is any such thing in all this mullarkey – to win some political kudos.

As one famous bloke once nearly put it, “Never have so few owed so much to so many” – or something of that ilk.

No doubt we will all remember this national disgrace when the parties want our votes in next month’s European elections.

Now there IS a gravy train.