“I can see ordinary people going round with shotguns and shooting them all,” said a pensioner in this industrious Berkshire town. She was so enraged by MPs’ expenses, she said, that she was tempted to shoot the Speaker herself.
The days when Dick Turpin reputedly rested up in a pub where this new town now sprawls have long gone. But voters outside Westminster are increasingly convinced that their representatives have got away with daylight robbery.
As Keith Rogers put it in Sleaford, where Conservative MP Douglas Hogg belatedly agreed to pay back £2,200 spent cleaning his moat: “This is not politics. It’s theft. MPs’ allowances are more than most people’s wages in Lincolnshire.”
When MPs returned to their weekly surgeries and other duties in their constituencies, they encountered a landscape transformed by revelations about their expenses. The cynicism of many voters towards Westminster had been replaced by something much more engaged, but also far more enraged.
In Bromsgrove, a window in Tory MP Julie Kirkbride’s constituency office was smashed with a brick. In Rutland, where fellow Tory Alan Duncan agreed to pay back nearly £5,000 of gardening expenses for tending the small plot around his constituency home, a 3ft pound sign was carved into his lawn and filled with campanula and violas.
Effusive apologies and promises to pay back their most outrageous expenses claims have failed to pacify the public.
“They know they’ve done something wrong because they are giving it back,” said Chris O’Riordan, a businessman, in Bracknell. “If I said: ‘I’ve just nicked a bottle of shampoo from Boots but I’ll give it back, am I all right?’ I’d be arrested.”
When Fred Binding, 90, watched the interview in which BBC News presenter Carrie Gracie admitted she earned £92,000, he “nearly fell through the floor”, he said.
For Binding, and many older voters in particular, the expenses scandal has highlighted a materialistic side to society that is completely alien to them.