We have been poorly served by the Telegraph’s revelations and manipulations. Led by the Telegraph, distinctions are being made between Utter Rotters, Minor Offenders, and Clean Hands which are often quite invalid.

First, the Clean Hands. There are undoubtedly many Clean Hands; more than abusers. Most MPs, it turns out, behave in private as fairly and honestly as they do when they know they are under scrutiny. As do most ordinary people. For some reason, the story-line A Minority of Grubby Graspers has not rung a bell with the public: what is heard more loudly is They Are All At It, which is plainly not the case.

All credit then to the true Clean Hands, and let us see more of them in Government and on opposition front benches. But let us clearly separate these people from the self-declared Clean Hands who are in truth utter rogues. I shall refer to this lot as ‘Cameron, Hoon, &c’. These two have rogered the Allowance with as much energy and dedication as any other MP (but fair play to the double-claimants, see below), despite both having large salaries, Cameron being a hereditary multi-millionaire, and Hoon having use of a grace-and-favour residence. I cannot see how the term ‘greedy’ could possibly be better merited.

A good political trick, to roll in the muck and smell only of roses. How is it done? By careful management of your mortgages. You take out loans that you do not need, you buy new property (on mortgage) although you already own a suitable property, you accumulate a property portfolio and you do all this on the quiet without attracting attention.

Thus Cameron, Hoon &c have been more effective than others in looting the system without leaving any embarrassing traces. We don’t know what they ‘did with the money’: as ever this would involve knowing what their expenditures would have been if they had not been given the money... for the very rich at least, the answer is likely to be that they added it to their savings, exactly the same as the probable answer for the moat-clearers and duck refuge builders.

Is cunning less morally contemptible than stupidity (or laziness, or whatever failing leads the dull operators to leave traces in horse manure)? I don’t think so. The mortgage-maximising Dirty Clean Hands brigade are no better than the moat clearers.

And the Dirty Clean Hands operators are no less venal than some other notorious Utter Rotters. Does anyone seriously believe that there is a moral difference between Cameron / Hoon behaviour and the sad sacks who claimed for mortgage ‘interest’ on loans which they had repaid? None, in my view. The sad sacks – clearly less clued up than the property millionaires – repaid mortgages, using money which they could instead have invested. In repaying the mortgage they deprived themselves of the returns on investment. If they made good this loss by claiming for mortgage ‘interest’ which did not exist, they certainly fell foul of formal rules in a way the Dirty Clean Hands operators didn’t, but that strikes me as merely technical. There is no important moral difference between claiming for a mortgage that you don’t need, and claiming for one that doesn’t exist.

Again take the chap who rented a flat from his daughter while ‘owning another flat nearby’. Fair enough, the Rules clearly disallow renting from family members. But that ‘other flat nearby’... Has the Telegraph the slightest idea how many of them own ‘other flats nearby?’. A good many, surely! Such as Hoon. It’s OK to remain in the Cabinet after being unmasked as a mortgage milker; but if you don’t get the grubby details quite right, you are denounced as a crook.

Or the woman who charged for some £20,000 of repairs at a house which was neither around Westminster nor in her constituency, but a long way from both. She has been forced to announce she won’t stand for re-election. What was so disgraceful about what she did, compared to Cameron or Hoon? She got less money than they did. Her sin, it seems to me, is merely that she failed to dress the matter up in a sufficiently cunning way. The Cameron approach would have been to raise money on a Westminster or constituency property, use it to repair the other house, and claim mortgage ‘interest’. If there was already a mortgage in place and the second mortgage rule was biting, then sell that property and buy another one nearby on a mortgage (stamp duty &c paid by us, remember), or rent it out and buy another one nearby on a mortgage. That she couldn’t be arsed to do this may illustrate why she was unlikely to rise to Cabinet level: but it does not indicate that she was greedier or grubbier than Hoon &c.

My own favourite graspers are the double-claimants.
‘Two can live as cheaply as one’ was surely inaccurate, as well as being sentimental. But the State pensions system, and no doubt the benefits system too (the Brown Disaster has not yet quite reduced me to needing a practical understanding of that one) reckons that a married couple need a good deal less than double the single-person rate. Where on Earth did the muppets get the idea that when two of them share a household, they should get between them as much as twice the individual allowance? Did no one realise that some couples would greedily grab a double allowance for a single property?
And the Worst Offenders among the double-claimants? Mackay and Kirkbride have been dragged on hurdles through the streets and gutted in the market-place. What did they do, which Balls/Cooper and the Keens did not? Well M ‘n’ K were a little unworldly in their arrangements, that’s all. Of course it ‘looks bad’ that they each claimed for one of the two properties which they shared. But had they put just a little more effort into it, they could have placed themselves as far above criticism as the Keens &c. All they needed to do was to sell a property not grand enough, or mortgaged enough, to absorb the double-mortgage Allowance, buy one that was grand enough, attach a fresh mortgage to it, and double claim, a la the Keens, on that.

Surely the Keens are peerless in their looting. I leave aside the fact that they live in commuter-land and insist on a town address. It is the scale, the sheer bloody scale of the second address that is so breath-taking. And all that was required was one simple piece of effrontery: to claim twice over for one address. What this enabled them to do was to purchase a millionaire-style swanky flat, costing some £ ½ million and yielding them so far a gain of £100,000. That is gross. But we seem to hear little of it.