Like many people, I have been disgusted by the MPs’ expenses scandals over the past couple of years, spitting feathers over the duck houses and the moat repairs paid for by taxpayers.
The scandal continues to rumble on, one of the recent cases being that of Denis MacShane, the former Labour minister who quit as MP for Rotherham earlier this month after he wrongfully claimed at least £7,500 in expenses.
The Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards found that his submission of false invoices was “plainly intended to deceive”. Parliament’s expenses authority and Mr MacShane repaid the money, apologised and accepted responsibility. The committee ruled that he had made no personal gain.
Now normally I would cheer that he has been named and shamed. But I think that one vital factor in his case has been overlooked.
Mr MacShane submitted 19 false invoices between 2004 and 2008. In 2004, his 24-year-old daughter Clare died in a skydiving accident in Australia and in 2008 his former partner and Clare’s mother, Carol Barnes, the newsreader who lived in Brighton, died a week after suffering a stroke, a week Mr MacShane spent holding her hand.
Extreme grief makes people behave in extreme ways, and when you factor in the shock of a sudden and unexpected death (as I experienced when my father died suddenly and unexpectedly in 2003), particularly when it’s your own child and someone so young, it can take many years to even begin to feel normal again.
You are overwhelmed by a tidal wave of anguish that engulfs everything, sweeping away common sense and judgment, and evoking extremes of emotion ranging from numbness to hysteria.
It’s so easy to expect the bereaved to “get over it” and “move on” but it’s never as straightforward as that. The death of your child is the deepest of traumas, whatever their age, not least because it overturns life’s natural order when parents normally die before their children.
Not only had Mr MacShane suffered the death of his daughter but four years later he was also faced with the loss of his child’s mother, the only person with whom he had shared memories of their daughter’s childhood. It was a double loss for him.
The long-term emotional impact of grief is still too rarely taken into account as the main contributory factor when people subsequently behave strangely.
Even politicians are human, and it’s very telling about the low regard in which we now hold MPs when you compare how Mr MacShane’s grief was dismissed by so many as just an “excuse” with the outpouring of sympathy that greeted the revelations by advertising guru Maurice Saatchi about the grief he has felt since the death from cancer of his wife, the novelist Josephine Hart, 16 months ago.
A few days ago, Mr Saatchi, who lives in Sussex, told how he is enduring “an incomparable nightmare” and has considered suicide. Mr MacShane, in a letter to his local newspaper after his resignation, wrote that when his daughter was killed “Rotherham was there even if that grief made me lose judgement on filling in expense forms at the end of an 18-hour day”.
If Mr Saatchi is experiencing such torments of grief in the aftermath of a death that was expected, then it is possible that Mr MacShane’s grief was many times greater. I have great sympathy for him.
Doll triggers breast vs bottle battle
The 'Breast Milk Baby' doll, which is going on sale at Christmas, has triggered a new battle in the war between breastfeeders and bottle-feeders.
"Bigotry" shrieks a bottle-feeding mum in the Daily Mail, so angry that the toy is being used to “brainwash” children she has labelled breastfeeders the "Breastapo". A writer in the Guardian says it's about time breast-feeding is seen as normal, while the Mirror quotes mums on Mumsnet saying it's "weird" and "gross".
Feeding your baby is an emotional issue because for the first few months of life, your child's health, growth and pure survival depends purely on the milk it is fed. But in this country today, a mother is judged, and judged harshly, on how she feeds her baby and on this issue opinions tend to be polarised.
The issue of breast v bottle first arose in the mid 19th century but for very different reasons. Then, it was concern about the wholesomeness of the milk from unhealthy badly-fed cows that in 1879 prompted Charles Routh, author of Infant Feeding and its Influence on Life, to announce in The Lancet, "Pure unadulterated breastmilk from its mother is the best food that can be supplied to the infant".
In addition to the immunity that breastmilk offers babies, there were worries that bottle-feeding mothers missed out on the delay in the return of menstruation that suckling caused, which promoted birth spacing and was better both for mother and child. Bottle-feeding was carried out only by those women who couldn't breastfeed for biological, medical or social reasons.
Today, the way a mother feeds her baby is seen as a lifestyle choice, allowing the judgmental to make breastfeeders feel like some sort of anachronistic hippie earth mother and bottle-feeders as women selfishly denying their baby the best start in life.
The truth is that many women cannot breastfeed, and agonise over it, regarding themselves as a failure. Some don't want to and today they do have a healthy alternative.
Whatever their choice, they all want to do their best for their baby.
The real issue is not whether the "Breast Milk Baby" doll is "gross", but how gross it is to harass new mothers over the way they provide their baby's most fundamental need.
Discussion leads to bullying
It seems to me that the more children are taught about bullying at school, the more bullying there is at school.
Like sex education, the earlier you bring up a subject, the more it is practised.
It’s Anti-Bullying Week this week and the theme is that bullying prevents achievement under the slogan “We’re better off without bullying”. Watch out for a spate of bullying in schools next week.
Lettuce look again at dieting
After a junk-free fortnight, I’m beginning to feel thinner, although I don’t look any different.
But I do have a new healthy eating guru. She’s called Joanna Lumley and the diet goes like this: “Lettuce, followed by some lettuce, with lettuce.”
She seems to have forgotten a few essentials, though, such as hunks of soft granary bread around the lettuce, a dash or two (or three) of dressing and a few slices of honey-baked ham to make the lettuce taste of something.
“Lots of people nowadays are too greedy,” says my new BF, pictured below. “People think: ‘I must have a cupcake’. What do you mean, you must? You’ll get fat, you fool.”
Oh. I’m beginning to see where I was going wrong. I shall follow her advice to the letter and banish my inner pig once and for all. Lettuce, lettuce and more |lettuce. This is going to be fun.
How’s your diet going? Got some advice? Let me know at katy.rice@theargus.co.uk.
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