I feel some sympathy for Mark Simmonds, the Conservative MP who’s resigned as a minister and is stepping down at the end of this Parliament because he can’t support his family. His announcement has been greeted with scorn and derision by the chattering classes — how dare he complain that an MP’s salary isn’t enough to live on? — even though most of them are earning far more than him. Any politician who utters a murmur of dissent about the terms and conditions of his or her employment is an instant pariah.
In fact, if you can be bothered to read beyond the headlines, Simmonds’s complaint seems pretty reasonable. His constituency is in Lincolnshire and under the new expenses regime he isn’t entitled to claim for the cost of renting a flat in London large enough to accommodate his family, just a hotel room. If he had a flat, his wife and three children could spend the weekdays with him and the weekends in his constituency, but as things stand he is forced to spend four nights a week sleeping alone in some seedy Westminster hotel. ‘Any parent would hate that — and I do,’ he said.
He was earning £89,435 as a Foreign Office minister and that’s nothing to sniff at. The trouble is, it’s not enough to put his family up in London during the week as well as maintaining a home in his constituency. It’s also worth noting that his ministerial salary represents the most he’s earned as an MP. Until he joined the government in 2012, he was on a backbencher’s wages and had been for over ten years. Before becoming an MP in 2001 he was a director of a successful property business and it’s a safe bet that if he’d spent the past 13 years in the commercial sector he’d be a multi-millionaire by now.
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