‘A little bit extra’

A very chic lady turned to me at a dinner party recently and in tremulous tones confided that she was being investigated for benefit fraud.

‘Infernal cheek,’ I said. ‘How typical that our chaotic benefits system should make such a stupid mistake. Instead of going after the layabouts, some idiot pen-pusher has put two and two together and made nine.’

‘No,’ she said, her cut-glass voice lowering until it was almost inaudible. ‘I have been fiddling benefits.’

I stared and stared at this elegant woman, dressed from head to foot in Armani. With her salon blow-dried hair and impeccable taste, she was to me the antithesis of what a benefit claimant looked like, never mind a fraudulent one. But it turned out that while living in central London and working part-time as an upmarket consultant in something terribly clever, she had also been registering as unemployed and claiming Jobseekers’ Allowance. When I questioned her about why on earth she had been doing this, she shook her head, said how ashamed she was, but that she had seen it as ‘a little bit extra’.