Following the great parliamentary expenses scandal from afar has been to view my home country through the wrong end of a telescope: so many scuttling figures, comically diminished in scale, like poor, tiny Douglas Hogg, with his flat cap and backpack, breathlessly hurrying down the street pursued by a giant fuzzy insect in the form of a microphone. 'That is not correct. That is not correct,' he told the insect, like a pedantic character in Alice in Wonderland. 'The schedule was not a claims schedule, it was a letter.'

LRB 11 June 2009 | PDF Download