The high cost of keeping our politicians on the road
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Version 0 of 1. Short of buying your own private jet, it’s quite hard to think how you would spend £757,000 on travel a year. And yet, the Daily Mail claimed today, Ed Miliband has somehow managed it. The Mail’s figures work out at £63,000 a month. You may surmise that the Labour leader’s car runs on crushed diamonds. If the numbers seem crazy, Labour says, that’s because they are. Miliband’s spokesperson flatly denies those sums, calling them “totally wrong”, and saying he didn’t know where the figures had come from; the Mail’s article doesn’t give a source. Labour declines to give an alternative figure, but whatever the true cost, it seems likely that it will be inflated by security expenses and the inevitable entourage that accompanies a senior politician’s every movement. Attempts to get a comparable figure for the Prime Minister didn’t get very much further, with a press officer at No 10 simply saying that they never discuss his travel arrangements. In truth, it’s not that surprising they don’t want to talk about it. Consider the blood-boiling phrase cannily deployed in the Mail’s report: those costs, we were reminded, “including being chauffeur-driven around the country”. Chauffeurs! Why do they so enrage us? Perhaps because they are so conspicuous: for shameless symbols of a political class milking the system for everything it can get, the Jag with tinted windows stands comparison with the duck house. To add a layer of Ianuccian hypocrisy, recall those ministers – David Cameron among them – who have proudly cycled to work as a red box full of documents is ferried in a car just behind. Cameron, to his credit, has made concerted efforts to reduce the expenditure on the ministerial fleet so that where once 78 ministers had access to an allocated car and driver, there are now only 13. (The rest must make do with a car from the pool.) And yet there are suggestions that the corresponding savings have been eaten up by an increase in taxi costs: ministers just don’t seem to fancy the tube. “It’s always been a source of tension,” says Geoffrey Dudley, author of a history of the Government Car Service, The Outer Cabinet. “There are definitely concerns about security and about efficiency, but I wouldn’t say they’re the No 1 reason they’re still around, to be honest. Ministers just like the cars. It becomes a way of life.” As leader of the opposition, Miliband is the only MP to get a car who isn’t a minister. But there are other anomalies. All former prime ministers get one; so, since the days of Cherie Blair, does the prime minister’s spouse. (Nigel Farage, meanwhile, has the £60,000 annual cost of a chauffeur-driven car covered by Ukip.) And the accusations of venality are nothing new. Dudley’s book is full of entertainingly optimistic interpretations of when the cars can be used, from James Callaghan’s attempt to lend his daughter the ministerial car for her wedding to Edward Heath’s leisure activities after he left office. “Civil servants were telling Harold Wilson [his successor] that he had to put a stop to it,” Dudley says. “He was using it to go yachting.” Those, Miliband may reflect, were the good old days. |