Fordyce Maxwell: 'We were all annoyed by the scale of the claims but few of us were surprised'

LIZ hurried out the back door one morning recently when she heard a raised voice in the garden and worried that a) the rabbit was back or b) we had an unwelcome visitor.

"Oh," she said, relieved as she saw me planting out a home-grown tray of anchusa – I like to get the "home-grown" bit in – "you're listening to the radio. Remember there are children next door."

"I know," I said, trying to seem and sound less like the character from The Fast Show who used to emerge from a tin shed, wearing tattered shirt, jeans and wellies, to bawl: "This year I shall mainly be wearing Dolce & Gabbana."

There are some differences. I have a constant supply of clean shirts, jeans and other accoutrements and emerge from a rather better shed. But I had been shouting.

"It's the bloody irony of it that gets me," I said, driving the trowel in, severing stem from roots and narrowly missing fingers as I prepared to explain why. But she had already gone. Witness of many a live encounter between man and media she didn't want an action replay.

What had triggered the raised voice was a Radio 4 discussion on parliamentary expenses. The irony, which I had been describing in possibly more colourful terms than the pathetic bunch of cheats deserve – on second thoughts, possibly not – was that only hours earlier I had conscientiously compiled details of my tax return.

Ha! I guess like most of us who pay our own bills and don't flip between homes when claiming expenses or laugh up our sleeve while the mugs – taxpayers/voters – cough up for them, I declare my income honestly and err on the side of caution with claims against potential tax.

I'm no keener to pay tax than the next man – especially and obviously if the next man happens to be an MP – but believe in the self-employed paying their whack as fairly as employees who have it deducted at source. But there I was fretting about claiming an equitable share of costs for phone, heat, light, etc, for working from home while our trusty MPs were claiming for gardeners, light-bulb changers, food, wreaths and much else while cashing in on property deals.

The worrying thing is that we were all annoyed by the scale of the claims, but few of us were surprised it was happening. Like the woman who said yes to sleeping with a man for £10,000, but reacted indignantly when asked if she would do it for £5 – punch line "We've established what you are, now we're haggling about price" – we know what so many MPs are, yet we are still astonished at their effrontery.

I like to think I'm naturally cynical and simply got more so with every passing year as a journalist, but in fact I have a naïve faith in the basic goodness of human nature. I don't fall for Nigerian prince e-mail scams or think I've won a Scandinavian lottery I haven't entered, but time after time I've been disappointed by politicians. Every time I've thought they can't behave more badly I realise they're still digging.

Rot the lot of them. Which is more or less what I shouted at the radio.