LONDON — Forget the fat-cat bankers with their million-dollar pensions. The people who have even the most reserved of Brits spluttering with outrage today are the politicians who ordered the moats on their country estates cleaned and who bought hundreds of sacks of horse manure (presumably for gardening purposes) -- and tried to charge taxpayers for it.
It's all part of a snowballing scandal in Britain that is fast leaving promising political careers in tatters. Day after day, new revelations over expenses claimed by elected officials bring fresh shame to an institution once proudly touted as "the mother of all parliaments."
On Friday, the debacle claimed its highest-profile victim yet when a government minister was forced to resign over his generous taxpayer-subsidized housing allowance.
Legislator Shahid Malik, a junior justice minister and rising star in the ruling Labor Party, stepped down from his minister post just hours after declaring that he had "nothing to apologize for" and that his claims for reimbursement for such items as a $3,000 flat-screen TV in his London apartment were perfectly reasonable.
Fear and trembling now stalk the august House of Commons as politicians brace for each new round of embarrassing revelations in the Daily Telegraph, the newspaper that obtained exclusively the information on lawmakers' expense reports.
For more than a week, the paper has served up front-page stories, beneath gigantic headlines, detailing the most egregious examples of what appears to be a prodigious talent shown by some members of Parliament for milking the system.
No political party has been spared, despite the paper's right-wing leanings.
Take, for example, former Cabinet minister Douglas Hogg, a lawmaker from the opposition Conservative Party, who submitted a receipt that included more than $3,000 for clearing out the moat on his manorial estate in the county of Lincolnshire. (Hogg has denied that he claimed it as an expense, saying that it was merely listed on a receipt with other expenditures that he did claim.)
Or his colleague, David Heathcoat-Amory, who asked to be paid back nearly $600 in taxpayer money for 550 bags of horse manure. Yet another horticulturally minded Tory member of Parliament, Alan Duncan, recouped about $6,000 in gardening costs over three years, including $900 for repairing a power mower, and fellow Conservative lawmaker David Willetts paid $150 for workers to come and replace 25 lightbulbs in his London home.
