Tam Dalyell's bookcases

More proof today, if any were needed, that the Westminster gravy train welcomed aboard the honourable as well as the dishonourable members. No less a personage than Tam Dalyell, uber-distinguished Labour baronet, the former Father of the House, is revealed as having touched the fees office for eighteen grand to spend on bookcases a matter of weeks before his retirement. Which was a bit steep even for that august body of scrutineers, not generally celebrated for their cheeseparing attitudes to what constituted a necessary and essential expense.

Dalyell, at least until these new revelations, might be said to have put the high into high-minded. He was as noble a crusader for unfashionable causes as the Commons has produced in the past century. Yes, he was boring and obsessive, and through the long years of his service he often ploughed a lonely furrow. He wasted most of the Eighties in an Ahab-like pursuit of Mrs Thatcher over the Belgrano sinking and the Westland Helicopters affair, the latter a convoluted business deal whose principal importance lay in provoking Michael Heseltine's resignation from the Cabinet. I forget what prompted Dalyell to develop his idée fixe for the subject. Dalyell was perhaps the Commons' greatest constitutional nit-picker. His Westlothian question still awaits a satisfactory answer. His mastery of obscure points of procedure exceeded that of any Speaker, and he would have made a fine Speaker himself.

This morning he was on the Radio, explaining how he was "absolutely at ease" about putting in the claim. He was retiring, he said; he had accumulated a lot of stuff, mainly a fine collection of Hansards; and he thought that having some "high-quality bookcases" would provide the best solution to his storage problem. Put like that, it's hard to see much objection to his modest request. Speaking as someone with far more "stuff" than is good for me, I too can see the point of bookcases, perhaps especially of high-quality ones. Indeed, there is sufficient snob in me to feel generally well-disposed towards someone who feels a greater need for high-quality bookcases than for a vast television "home-cinema" system with what is known in the trade as "surround sound", like yesterday's highest profile casualty, Shaheed Malik. I would quite like some high-quality bookcases myself, especially if I didn't have to pay for them. Space might be a problem. Not for Tam, though. The high-quality bookcases make a no doubt handsome addition to his ancestral castle in Scotland.

But here's the thing. Dalyell was leaving. Indeed, that was why he wanted his high-quality bookcases: he needed somewhere to put his Hansards after he had ceased to be a member of Parliament. The expenses regime was supposed to defray the costs MPs might incur while doing their job. By definition, these high-quality bookcases should not have been covered by the rules. Of course, the rules were highly complex, hard-to-follow rules; there is ample proof of that in the fact that so many MPs had trouble understanding them. As, indeed, did the Fees Office. The difference between an essential expense and a discretionary one can be subtle. Exactly how large, or how expensive, does a television set have to be to enable an MP to do his or her job of representing constituents, for example? Even now, no-one really knows. Yet Tam Dalyell was famous, above all, for his mastery of the most obscure points of detail; it was what made him so effective a campaigner, and so intolerable a bore. So he might be thought capable of appreciating that something he intended to use only after he had left the House of Commons was not a Parliamentary expense. Obviously not.

These high-quality bookcases were, in reality, a retirement present. After so long and distinguished career, it might be thought that a subtle hint directed to a colleague might have led to a whip-round to buy him some bookcases. But no: it has to be us. Or he could have done what most people do when they run out of bookshelves and pack the surplus volumes off to Oxfam. He could consult Hansard online, like most mere mortals have to. Or he could keep them in boxes in a cupboard.

Yet Dalyell was, and remains, "absolutely at ease" that he asked the taxpayer for more than many of his constituents earned in a year so he could have somewhere smart to keep his books. If so unjustified a sense of entitlement can infect so upright a character as Tam Dalyell, the rot has spread far indeed.