“I’m one of the ‘not yet disgraced’”

Sussex MP Peter Bottomley speaks exclusively to HEART about the expenses scandal, his own claims and why it’s hard for middle class MPs

In the recent scandal of MPs’ expense claims, it has been the MPs married to another MP who have, perhaps, been most roundly condemned, for making generous use of the second home expenses allowances. It is these couples who have been shamed into standing down at the next election – and in turn condemned for not retiring from the Commons immediately.

Peter and Virginia Bottomley are one of the best known couples; at one time they were both serving MPs and in the snakes and ladders careers of politics, Peter Bottomley spent 1984-1990 as a minister in the Departments of Employment, Transport and Northern Ireland, while Virginia was a backbench MP. In 1988 she became a junior minister and her career continued to ascend after a reshuffle returned her husband to the back benches in 1990. Mr Bottomley gained a reputation as the perfect, self-effacing husband while his wife was Secretary of State for Health from 1992-1995.
Through the ups and downs of politics, there was the problem of what to do about the homes. To some extent this has eased now that Virginia, a One Nation Conservative and lifelong member of the Tory Reform Group, is Baroness Bottomley. Their main home is in Surrey, and they continue to divide their time between Worthing and Westminster. They avoided the scandal which has hit married MP couples by not claiming for the same home when they were both in the Commons.

“We had more homes than many people, but we’ve always paid for the other homes ourselves”, Mr Bottomley explained to me. He rattled off the list: there’s his flat in his Worthing constituency, a ‘holiday hovel’ on the Isle of Wight, an ‘overgrown’ cottage in his wife’s old Surrey constituency (making it clear that, unlike his party leader, he will not need to repay a wisteria clearing bill) and a home in Westminster. “After the 2005 election, I paid for all the costs myself on the Worthing flat which I had owned since before my election to Worthing in 1997.”

As soon as the expenses scandal hit the headlines, he called a local meeting with East Worthing MP Tim Loughton and found himself defending a claim of £6,000 for the flat’s replacement windows. “The block was built in 1975 and the windows couldn’t be opened. It struck me that making the windows ones you could get out of in case of fire was a rational thing to do!” At their meeting, he invited people to come and inspect his windows – “whether or not they chose to make a donation to the Worthing Churches’ Homeless Project” – but nobody took him up on his offer. He was also under fire for claiming £980 for bookshelves but explains this simply: “I have books and I have files.” Clearly rather a lot.
In 2007-8 his total expenses came to £126,603, of which his second home allowance came to £23,083, based on his Westminster home. His principle is to see his main home for capital gains tax purposes as the one with the biggest mortgage, the Surrey cottage. “It’s the home we still own and although it’s not on a direct route between Worthing and Westminster, it’s not too far away. Additionally, I don’t claim mileage for going there. To that extent, I think I take the public interest properly into account and my travelling expenses have always been in the bottom quarter of MPs’ expense claims.”

“There’s one group of those who have been disgraced, one group of those who are disgraceful and the third group is those of us who have not been disgraced yet

He was appalled when MPs were told, several years back, that they could claim 70p per mile driven on constituency business. “That was scandalous; I argued against it and didn’t claim it for seven years until it was brought down to the same level as a district nurse’s mileage allowance. In fact, in my first 22 years in Parliament he claimed no additional costs.”
    He insists, “I was neither aware of nor experienced any encouragement to claim the amounts we are now hearing of – the maximum allowances, or to claim anything that is not proper.”
    He feels that MPs fall into three groups and that he’s in the third group: “There’s one group of those who have been disgraced, one group of those who are disgraceful and the third group is those of us who have not been disgraced yet – and there may be an overlap between the groups.”
    This sounds as if he would not be surprised to be condemned, because he says, “No-one can claim to be perfect. If in doubt, the general public’s interest comes first, in the same way that one puts one’s children’s interests first. But I’m perfectly capable of making arithmetical mistakes in adding up my expenses and I’m grateful to people who point these out.
    “I have a rule: I don’t do something I wouldn’t want to see in my local newspaper. “
Unlike some MPs, he does not expect to change the way he claims expenses. “Before the expenses scandal broke, I had paid off the mortgage on our Westminster home and left an outstanding loan of just £250, but I’m not going to charge interest on that. I’d also reduced the loan four years before; I take the view that I should behave like other people – when I can reduce the mortgage, I do, rather than keeping it at the maximum. And during the previous year, I had not claimed anything for food. In the years before that, I had, which seemed perfectly sensible, but given that we’re in a new period of austerity, I think I need to share the burden and I’m better able to do that than some.”
The claims for food by other MPs have shocked other citizens as much as the ‘flipping’ of designated second homes for the avoidance of capital gains tax. Surely MPs only needed to eat the same as the rest of us who work and pay for our own food? Mr Bottomley explained he cannot and wouldn’t claim for the entertaining he does two or three times a week, but feels it is reasonable to claim for restaurant food if he is obliged to eat in the House of Commons. “If I were at home, sharing a meal with my wife, the ingredients might cost, say, £8, and the labour cost is me and the washing up is me, that’s a lot less than if I were having a two course meal with somebody else which would cost £20 instead of £4. Again, if I’m not going to the constituency, I normally get to the House of Commons by about 6.45, then go for breakfast at about 8.30 in the cafeteria, which costs about £5, whereas if I were at home, I’d just have a bowl of muesli. So I think these costs are genuine.”
He asks to summarise the expenses situation: “We should have a system which is not where I could afford not to claim my full salary – because I don’t claim it – where I can carry some of these expenses because I can afford it. That’s fine for me, because I don’t have dependent children now and our housing costs are not great, especially as the mortgage is paid off.
“But I have to feel for the person who gets elected to the House of Commons at the age of 33, who may have a non-working husband or wife, two dependent children and whose housing costs may be much greater than mine but whose home is worse than mine.
    “Suppose a local family doctor got elected to the House of Commons and wanted to be at Westminster for three days a week, what would their costs be? And if their salary was, say, £64,000 a year, and if they had unclaimable costs which no-one complains about such as the jumble sales and the raffle tickets, the bottle of wine at some charity dinner you go to, that brings their pay to say, £58,000. They then have unavoidable extra costs, not party political or to do with elections, which bring their family income down to, say, £50,000, whereas their GP’s salary was £90-110,000. Could you say being an MP should be a possibility for a doctor, and how much salary reduction do you want them to have? That’s the question.
    “If your MP is not worth the salary and the allowances, it’s better to change the MP and get a better one than make them like a church mouse. The poor can be a Member of Parliament, as can the rich; but what about the competent people in between?”
    He is not comfortable being faced with my direct question about whether he tithes as a Christian and told me, “Virginia and I give away much more than a tithe, but we don’t make a thing about it – it’s not the way we’ve been brought up. But we do give up some things, such as mileage, which we’re entitled to.”
    He himself does not claim his full salary of £64,000, partly through the ‘Give As You Earn’ scheme, similar to payroll giving, but suspects that his 89-year-old father gives away a higher proportion of his income.
    Over the years they have committed themselves to a number of charitable causes: Peter has been a trustee of Christian Aid, Chairman of the Church of England Children’s Society and has served time on the councils of NACRO (the National Association for the Care and Resettlement of Offenders) and MIND, the mental health charity. “My wife does even more”, he claims, in addition to the directorships she holds.
    There is a strong overlap between his work as an MP and his churchgoing; he is ‘active in a number of churches’, whether going to funerals, inductions, or giving an address; this happens about once a fortnight. “Our default position, if we haven’t been to church in the morning, is to go to the 6.30 informal service at Westminster Abbey, which is a place I’ve been going to since I was about eight. There’s also a monthly parliamentary communion at St Margaret’s, Westminster.”
    Mr Bottomley does not number among the Daily Telegraph’s 50 ‘Saints’ – MPs who minimised their expenses deliberately – but he did come across as a principled man, with a traditional but genuine Christianity which expresses itself modestly in deeds rather than words. I have no doubt that he ponders all he does in the light of his faith, which is no mean achievement in the tough world of politics. I for one will not be casting the first stone at him.
Melanie Symonds
“I have a rule: I don’t do something I wouldn’t want to see in my local newspaper”
Quotes:
“There’s one group of MPs who have been disgraced, one group of those who are disgraceful and the third group is those of us who have not been disgraced yet”
“If your MP is not worth the salary and the allowances, it’s better to change the MP and get a better one than make them like a church mouse”
“I wasn’t brought up to talk about giving”

editor, 15/07/2009