Queen’s composer plans opera about MPs’ expenses

After Carol Ann Duffy marked her appointment as Poet Laureate with Politics, a contemptuous and angry work inspired by the recent revelations about MPs expenses, another royal appointee plans to throw his vegetables at the stocks.

Sir Peter Maxwell-Davies, the Queen's Master of Music, has announced that he is writing a comic opera about the MPs' expenses scandal. "Who knows, the set may have a few duck houses and moats in it," he said. "I may even invite a few MPs to the opening night. They will of course want free tickets, but be able to claim them on expenses for some fictitious fee."

Maxwell-Davies, 75, is a distinguished musician who has conducted the BBC Philharmonic orchestra. He made his announcement at the St Magnus classical music festival in Orkney, a festival he set up over 30 years ago. "These people are a public disgrace,” he said of the MPs, "and deserve to be publicly disgraced on stage. The bankers are also in for a rough ride in the work too."

This isn't be the first time Maxwell-Davies feels he has been swindled. Two years ago he was in the headlines after he came across a black hole in his finances and it emerged that a friend and former business partner had stolen almost £450,000 from him.

Nor is this the first time that Maxwell-Davies has used his music to tackle a political issue. When there were plans to mine uranium ore just outside Stromness, the second largest town in Orkney, Maxwell-Davies wrote a work called Farewell to Stromness, in which a slow bass line represented the steady trudge of residents abandoning the town.