NOW WHERE HAVE I HEARD THAT BEFORE?

I`m hesitant about commenting on the furore concerning MPs expenses - the newspapers, radio and tv are going on about it non-stop - but there are one or two aspects of this whole business that make me even more infuriated than I am normanlly about where my taxpayer money is going. OK, so a lot of it may be trivial, some of it may be unsubstantiated, quite a bit appears indefensible (horse manure, kit-kats, bathplugs and porn films) but the things that make me really angry are twofold.

First, our elected representatives simply don`t get it; they either don`t understand the real world beyond the Westminster village - or they understand the reaction of the real world only too well, which is why they have gone to such lengths not only to try to suppress the information but also to call in the police to investigate how details of their expenses claims were obtained by the Telegraph in the first place.

But more tellingly, it is the reaction of the MPs themselves to this media and therefore public exposure of what they have been doing with our money. They blame the system.....but it was a system brought in by Parliament itself. They blame the Fees Office.....but if MPs didn`t submit dodgy claims then the Fees Office wouldn`t have a problem. Because all the Fees Office can do is apply Parliament`s own rules to the claims made and however immoral or unjustified those claims might be, if they fall within the rules, then they have to be paid.

And so we come to the loudest squeal of all coming from the seemingly bottomless trough - the MPs themselves are all adamant that their claims were made within the rules and approved by the Fees Office and so they have done nothing wrong. At which point, the Nuremburg Defence has taken over. "We were just following orders," they claim. I thought I had heard that somewhere before.

Now, I`m the last one to start moralising but I think I am qualified to consider the importance of `responsibility.` It just seems to me that our MPs, especially Cabinet Ministers, might perhaps have questioned the `appropriateness` of some of their claims before expecting us taxpayers to pay them. I would like to think that I - and especially my conscience - would have acted responsibly, reasonably, sensibly, when considering whether to submit a claim or not and therefore guaranteeing that my sleep would not be disturbed. I wonder how many of our MPs manage to sleep at night.

Perhaps the truth is that they just don`t care. Well, they may not, but I`m pretty sure the electors do and I for one am looking forward to the upcoming elections, especially the one for the European Parliament, for if we think the MPs in this country have had a gravy train for too long, I have a feeling we ain`t seen nothing yet.