Mr Jacqui Smith is a crap bookkeeper
There is a simmering discontent with the entire political class, not just Richard Timney
Surely the thing that really rankles about Richard Timney's habits is not that he watches pay-per-view porn, but that he's such a crap bookkeeper? With keyboard-clackers losing their jobs like Tommies going over the desktop no one can afford to have makeweights on the payroll like Timney, but Jacqui Smith has been dobbing him somewhere between 20 and 40 grand a year to play the part of her 'constituency aide'.
I don't happen to think pornography is a victimless crime: on the end of that remote control button is not some free-spirited - yet entirely well-adjusted - nymphomaniac, but a collection of miserable and tranquilised emotional zombies.
Pornography and drugs are just the most poisonous of the fruits of globalisation
But that being noted, most of us have succumbed to the lure of a fiver's worth of arousal at some time or another - hell, it's just one of the panoply of seeming-delights that we consume, without bothering to consider the consequences for their producers. Who could happily slip on their trainers if they were treated to a view of the child-labourer who stitched them for a couple of bucks a day? Or bite down on an out-of-season sugar snap bean if he was confronted with the human being who wrecked her back harvesting them? Not me. Porn - together with drugs - is just the most poisonous of the fruits of globalisation.
No, Timney is a crap bookkeeper, and his boss - together with the rest of her parliamentary cronies - is a crap legislator, because she seems to believe that it's acceptable for the people's representatives to be remunerated on an ad hoc basis. Still, let's think no more on it, the grubby, furtive manipulation of paper and hand that goes into MPs' expenses claims is only a diversion from the really bad habits of the political class. It may have been Fred Goodwin who got his windows smashed, but it's not just fat cat bankers who the British people are angry with - there's a simmering discontent with the entire political class, although it's expressed in calling only for individual resignations.
We can’t get them all to quit without a revolution, so we moan about their antics
It may have been Labour in power, but there wasn't a single member of Her Majesty's loyal Opposition who saw the recession coming and reacted appropriately. Nor do the Tories have a sorbet's chance in hell of creating sustainable economic growth any faster than the incumbents - and in their heart of hearts they know it. If we take them at their own word - which maintains that government is important and powerful - then both sides of the House are equally culpable. But we can't get them all to quit - that's called a revolution - so instead we moan about their peccadilloes.
This week's G20 summit - paid for by you and me - is just more of the style-over-substance politics that's dominated the last decade. There will be a lot of posturing, a lot of strutting, a lot of mutual preening, but precious little insemination of the world economy. If I were the Commissioner of the Met, and peering into the void where my - and my colleagues' - pensions used to be, I wouldn’t bother cracking down on anarchist nutters, I’d simply lock the doors of the Excel Centre and let the world leaders stew in their own juice.
Of course, the alternative view is that far from being morally responsible for this balls-up, HMG wasn't that powerful at all - at least not in an integrated and deregulated world; therefore the
likes of Smith - and Brown, for that matter - should 'fess up to quite how impotent they'd become once they’d handed the keys of the economy to the sugar snap bean merchants. 
Filed under: Jacqui Smith, MP's expenses
About the author
Will Self is the author of six novels, six collections of shorter fiction, and four of his journalism. He is a... MORE
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Spot on, who decides that these career politicians should have the privilege of representing us. We only get to vote for those the 'parties' put forward, no one else has the publicity machinery or resources to wage serious competition. It may be April Fool's day, but this has gone beyond a joke! Its time we had a change in the system, an end to political parties and a way of selecting those best suited to the work to be done. Perhaps then we'd have government concerned with the country and not their own self advancement.
Posted by William Horsburgh at 10:32am on April 1, 2009
Mr Self, as ever a great chunk of frank writing, please keep it up, you are the voice of the nation.
Posted by Jeff Scott at 11:01am on April 1, 2009
Very tame Will, are you becoming complacent in (y)our twilight years? Has there ever before been a generation that could say, "so glad that I'm not young!". The future ain't gonna be pretty and I doubt that our heirs.. err.. descendents will be very pleased with the wastrels that bequeathed them the post-locust world.
Posted by allan kessing at 11:59am on April 1, 2009
What self-pleasing rubbish - it had nothing to do with "deregulation"; the rules we had (and still have) are/were more than capable of taking the banks to task - the FSA, however, wasn't. Combine that with a vested interest in Brown collecting huge tax receipts on the back of bank/stock market-mandated ponzi schemes, not to mention the push for "equality" (i.e. pushing the banks into giving people money who could never dream of paying it back) from politicos, & combine this with the huge vested interest of many Labour MP's in keeping the banks afloat due to the huge amount of employment they provide in their constituencies & can anyone really wonder why we have this situation. I've got an alternative idea - scrap all regulation bar one piece; an identification of someone/some group who are responsible for the actions of their corporations, then prosecute the hell out of them when they commit real crimes, and dont bail them out when they get into trouble. As for Mr. Smith and his money-grubbing wife; they will be judged at the ballot box as will all the other impotent MPs on either side of the debate; I will hold mine to account by standing against them next time.
Posted by Thom at 12:25pm on April 1, 2009
I never thought about Timney being on a large salary and being 'employed' by Smith. I assume therefore that he will be suspended by his boss until the case is investigated with a possible outcome of a final warning or as mutual trust as obviously been eroded perhaps dismissal. This is what would happen in the real word methinks.
Posted by sonsdad at 1:43pm on April 1, 2009
Will, old chap, don't you realise that, for all your impeccable left wingery, your final comments about the government are, in effect, utterly Conservative?
Posted by prziloczek at 5:14pm on April 1, 2009
At last SOMEBODY is injecting some semblance of a rational and clear eyed comment into this grubby exhibition we've been subjected to recently, I have been aching to find out a) Is Timney qualified to be p.a. to a Home Secretary and b) Was this post subject to equal ops and put out to tender? Thanks Will
Posted by angryangel at 7:00pm on April 1, 2009
Thanks, Will, for giving sane and sensible words to voice our anger and frustration. Doesn't seem much point in 'voting them out'; I'd rather be more positive and 'vote somebody in'. But who?
Posted by Hugh Mosby-Joaquin at 9:39pm on April 1, 2009
Woah, reality check here: I don't see people harbouring a simmering discontent about, for instance, Vince Cable. I also think a degree of research into the Porn that Timney was watching could serve everyone rather well: One film was "Fresh Meat", part of a series produced by the San Francisco based director, John Leslie (no relation to the ex Blue Peter presenter!) Even the most casual examination of Leslie's life, times and personal philosophy reveals that his participants are anything but tranquilised zombies: in the universe of porn, what I take from this is that Timney has better taste and discernment, than Self. Judge not, and all that...
Posted by Doktor Gummi at 10:47am on April 3, 2009
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