Over at a newer smarter Business & Politics is my take on the Denis MacShane story:
... As the US election saga limps to its end, those of us who favour the victory by Mitt Romney do not find it hard to point to staggering examples of corruption and abuse of power by people closely connected to the Obama administration. Democrats of course throw back plenty of examples of Republican scandals. Then there’s the eternal problem of EU funds that never seem to be properly audited or accounted for. Further afield we have seen the recent stories run by the New York Times looking hard at the financial machinations of the top communist elite in China. The sums of money involved in all these abuses and suspected abuses run not into millions, but into bewildering billions.
By comparison these British Parliamentary scandals are embarrassingly microscopic, banal in their parochial prosaic pettiness and sheer lack of ambition. Good grief! He bought several laptops! And books! Down he goes.
Down Denis has to go, and rightly so.
MPs perch themselves right at the very top of the public policy chain. They have the ultimate power to set the rules and proudly to call to account those anywhere in the system who abuse them. Plus they have all sorts of privileges from being members of that plumply funded parliamentary club with its cheap bars and affable, elegant restaurants.
In these circumstances, those of us who have spent decades living scrupulously by the rules and working late into the night to account for every penny find ourselves with no sympathy to spare for people in high office who sent us orders and demanded scrupulous adherence to the rules, yet time and again personally signed off their own expenses claims that they knew were cutting corners if not explicitly dishonest.
With great power comes great responsibility. And with great abuses of responsibility comes great – and richly deserved – humiliation.
Plenty more, recalling the famed Jar of Warsaw.
