Forgive me if I am not shocked about this announcement. The local press are full of Norman lamb visiting here there and everywhere and similarly, the Evening News always has reports about the work Ian Gibson does in Norwich. However, if Christopher Fraser came up to me and shouted in my face "I'm Christopher Fraser, MP for South West Norfolk", I'd still not be able to pick him out from a crowd.
I seem to recall Winston Churchill said of Clement Atlee "An empty taxi pulled up outside of 10 Downing Street and Clement Atlee got out of it".This statement could truly have been written about Christopher Fraser. I know IDS was the quiet man, but Christopher Fraser is the invisible man of Norfolk. During the General Election he refused to do the usual public meetings that his predecessor Gillian Shephard would have done, and his local profile is almost no-existent.
I guess the office expenses tell us one thing, those MP's with low office expenses spend less on representing their constituents than they might. It's just a shame for their constituents.
3 comments:
The mock-outrage that accompanies the release of MPs' expenses accounts each year really has become boring.
Though given your point about the low spenders doing less, I was amused to see that George Galloway's postage bill was zero.
Nich, this is the sort of thing I might have written a couple of years ago about Mr L - and you would have castigated me for it!
To be fair Iain, it is never something you could have said with a straight face about Norman, although it never stopped you at the time.
However, there is an important point I am trying to make here. there are some Norfolk Tories who are NOT invisible. Gillian Shephard was never invisible, neither is Henry Bellingham and even Richard Bacon does things that are reported, but Christopher Fraser has such a low profile, even amongst his own electorate (I have friends in Swafham and Watton), that they ask me who their MP is.
Compare this to when I was delivering leaflets in North Norfolk yesterday and people were without prompting telling me what a good man Nroman Lamb is.
I was trying to make a serious point though that MP's expenses are actually an indicator of the amount of work their office is doing. If some MP's are not employing their full allocation of staff, are they being good MP's for saving money or bad MP's for not doing the very best for their electorate ?
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