MPs may not act like Silvio, but they stink all the same

Is it vulgar to mind about MPs' expenses? Etiquette experts often say that such hard-and-fast rules are a thing of the past. Even so, one gathers that, in more and more circles, an admission of continuing interest is tantamount to asking Deborah, Dowager Duchess of Devonshire for the little boys' room at Chatsworth. Stephen Fry, spiritual heir to Nancy Mitford, was the first to hint, after the story broke, that anyone sensitive to non-U issues might want to shun the "rather tedious, bourgeois obsession with whether or not they've charged for their wisteria". Smarting rather from the rebuke, some members of the bourgeoisie looked up Johnson's comments to Boswell, about a man who maintained there was no difference between virtue and vice. If, said Johnson, he really did think that there was no such distinction: "Why, sir, when he leaves our houses let us count our spoons."

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/may/31/mps-expenses-political-scandal