Do all politicians read from the same playbook?

The gravy train starts here

(Evening Standard Magazine: 06/08/2003)

Daniel Hannan, MEP

Bad news from Brussels. The Euro MPs really are raking it in at our expense, says Daniel Hannan, and he should know — he’s one of them. Welcome to the land of champagne and gravy.

It is a myth that we MEPs fiddle our expenses. We don’t need to. All our allowances are handed over uncondition­ally, without any need for invoices or receipts. There is, as it were, nothing to fiddle.

‘Ah, so you’re one of those, are you?’ people say. ‘We know all about you lot: gravy train, first-class travel, champagne lifestyle.’ But they are missing the point. An MFP who travels Ryanair from Stansted and sleeps in the specially provided bed in his office is arguably behaving more shabbily than one who flies business class. Let me explain.

Whenever you travel from your constituency to Brussels or Strasbourg, you are reimbursed on the basis of the most expensive fare plus a ‘kilometrage’ allowance — regardless of how you
actually make the journey. If you travel full fare, you end up a couple of hundred pounds ahead. But if you are prepared to take the cheapest possible route, you can easily make £700 to £800 a week — tax-free, since it counts as expenses rather than income. And the longer the distance, the greater the profit: someone fly­ing from, say, Naples or Riga could end up trousering well over £1,000 per trip. One lucky Euro MP lives in the Canary Islands.

Then there is the daily attendance allowance: €262 (around £173) per day, Monday to Friday. In theory, this is to pay for meals and accom­modation. But the clever thing to do is to buy an apartment, and then sub-let a room to your researcher. With luck, this will cover your mortgage, allowing you to take home nearly £1,000 a week in clear profit — tax-free, again. Forget about paying for your meals, by the way. When­ever you’re hungry, just stretch out your arm and hail a passing lobbyist.

You don’t actually have to turn up at any meetings to qualify for your attendance allowance, lust before the European election, an Austrian MEP called Hans-Peter Martin revealed that several of his socialist col­leagues had been signing the register and then im­mediately flying home. He quickly became the most hated man in Brussels. A British Labour MEP, Gordon Adam, knocked him down as he tried to film people signing in — to, it must be said, general applause.


It’s the same deal when it comes to your staff allowance, now nearly £9,000 a month. This awesome sum is quite enough to employ a genuine secretary, as well as a researcher and possibly a stagiaire, while still having a good fifty or sixty grand left over for the missus, provided you describe her as your second secretary. I wish I could tell you that this practice was confined to wily Continentals but, as far as I have been able to establish, a clear majority of British MEPs employ immediate members of their families. In fact, we’re rather famous for it. ‘What is it about you English?’ a French colleague once asked. ‘You employ your wives, and you sleep with your staff.’

Does the SEO company you're considering have references and testimonials from their clients? Can you contact the people providing testimonials to ask about their experiences using the seo Company? Considering each of these aspects before selecting an SEO company will help you choose a reputable company that will give you the results you need. Please do my paper. Bob, look here Automatic Essay Writer you can find more.

I suspect it’s the shock of being catapulted into a glamorous world. We are trailed in the corridors by pretty interns; our speeches, how­ever banal, are translated into 20 languages; we have a special passport to whisk us through air­ports without queueing; lobbyists fight for the right to feed us. The better Brussels restaurants, La Maison du Cygne overlooking the Grand Place, and Comme Chez Soi, which is counted among the best in the world, treat Eurocrats and lobbyists as their core custom. Crocodile in Strasbourg receives so much indirect subsidy from the European Par­liament that it really deserves its own para­graph in the EU budget. The champagne recep­tions in the parliament’s salons seem a long way away from our previous lives as polytechnic lectur­ers. Add in the temptation of bcing away from home all week and it is perhaps not surprising that some MEPs begin to tire of the wives they acquired at an earlier stage in their social evolution.

Let me say at once that many MEPs behave impeccably; and that their wives often work harder than any secretary, organising diaries on Sunday afternoons, fielding telephone calls while waiting at the school gates. But the point is that they don’t need to. No one ever checks. The system is based on sums of money being handed over for you to spend as you please. For example, we get just over £2,300 a month in the aptly named ‘general expenses’ allowance. In theory, this is to cover costs connected with our parliamentary work, such as office rent, postage and petrol. In practice, it is never audited, and many MEPs have it paid directly into their current accounts.

No one ever asks you to supply receipts. In fact, virtually the only way to get found out is to alienate your staff. A few years ago, a Labour MEP called Glyn Ford made the mistake of falling out with his secretary. It then emerged that he was spending his Euro allowances on, among other things, gardening and laundry bills. The parliamentary authorities mounted an investigation which, without exactly contradict­ing the secretary, nonetheless cleared Mr Ford. I suspect the ‘investigation’ went something along these lines. ‘Ah, hello, Glyn, fees office here. So sorry about this beastly business in the press. Look, we have to ask this: have you done anything to be ashamed of?’ ‘No fear!’ ‘Good man. Thanks for being so honest.’

The truth is that the European Parliament operates a tacit double standard. If you are a goody-goody federalist, you can get away with a great deal. But woe betide you if you are a Euro­sceptic. During the last session, two UKIP MEPs, Nigel Farage and Jeffrey Titford, published accounts showing that they had contributed several thousand pounds from their excess allowances to Euro-sceptic causes. The parliament instantly demanded that they repay the money. When I asked the authorities why they were acting in this case but in no others, I was told that it was because they had admitted in writing to running an excess —rather than, it was implied, quietly pocketing it.

By writing this article, I am more or less guaranteeing that I will be accused of some infraction or other. So why am I doing it? It cer­tainly won’t make me any friends. The last time I touched on this subject publicly, I was sent to Coventry — or ‘sent to Limoges’, as amused French MEPs called it. A German colleague, with whom I had previously been rather friendly, sent me the following e-mail: ‘Dear Daniel Hannan, I can only assume that you were drunk before writing about your colleagues in this way.’ A fellow Con­servative, a peer of the realm no less, swayed sweatily towards me at a drinks reception. ‘Hannan, you’re a c**, a c***, a –er, a c***,’’ he bellowed. ‘A c***’, he added, just to ram home his point.

Nonetheless, I want you to contem­plate the reality of the Brussels system. Under the proposed constitution, we would hand substan­tial new powers to the EU. Before doing so, it is surely sensible to look at how it is exercising the powers it already has. MEPs seem unable to tackle the gargantuan fraud in the EU spending programmes. They have repeatedly refused even to put their own house in order. Yet it is now proposed that these same people be put in charge of our legal system, our borders, our taxes and our policing. My masters, are you mad?

It is not even as though MEPs have simply failed to get around to hosing out their stable On the contrary, every year the budget contains an amendment linking allowances to actual costs incurred; and every year it is voted down. It is true that the parliament indicated last year that it would reform the expenses regime, but only in return for a substantial pay rise. Give us more over the counter, MEPs effectively said, and we’ll be prepared to take less under it.

An elaborate game is played whenever a clean-up is suggested. MEPs declare themselves in favour until the last minute, then find a technical reason to vote against. Sometimes, they miscalculate. During the last session, there was a proposal to extend the free health insurance enjoyed by all Members to ex-MEPs, too. Across the chamber, you could see people looking intently at the declared positions of the main parties. They were trying to work out whether the proposal was sure to get majority backing, thus enabling them, personally, to vote ‘no’ without actually stopping it. Hilariously, too many of them made the same calculation, and the proposal fell by a handful of votes. I have never seen the hemicycle so glum.

Not that they need worry. The idea is almost certain to come back and, sooner or later, it will be approved. For all the earnest rhetoric, you can be sure that the income of Eurocrats will move only in one direction. That’s enough gravy: bring on the champagne!