Sunanda K Datta-Ray: Buta Singh vs David Blunkett

WHERE MONEY TALKS

Forget Buta Singh and all those other Delhi politicians who are said to be hanging on to official residences to which they are no longer entitled. Their offence is minor compared with the luxury in which their British counterparts wallow. Until Tony Blair's ignominious defeat on Wednesday night, the buzz here in London was whether David Blunkett, who had to quit recently as works and pensions secretary, would also be persuaded to move out of the fashionable £3 million Belgravia flat that went with his job.

Obviously, we learnt about housing scams "" among so many other things, good and bad "" from our former colonial masters. Blunkett, the blind and bearded working class lad from Sheffield who hurtles from scandal to scandal, is said by many to epitomise the joys of public service after which Indian politicians hanker. When he resigned earlier as home secretary, not even wild horses "" not that any had the temerity to try "" could drag him out of the same Belgravia flat. Worse, he kept a dark secret of the fact that he had let his own modest flat in south-west London for a monthly £700, admittedly chicken-feed compared to the Belgravia flat's estimated £150,000 annual rent. Blunkett, who also has the free use of a cottage on the Duchess of Devonshire's estate at Chatsworth, charged the government nearly £21,000 last year to maintain his constituency home up north in Sheffield.

But why blame Blunkett alone? His friend and leader, the prime minister, claimed more than $16,000 last year for the upkeep of his home in County Durham. The justification for this, as for Blunkett's Sheffield house, is that a member of parliament must spend time in his constituency in the line of duty, and that the taxpayer should bear some part of the cost of doing so. Apparently, these constituency homes also double up as offices. Of course, Blair has 10 Downing Street rent-free because a prime minister must live somewhere worthy of his position, and the country house at Chequers, also for nothing, because the man who bears the burden of governance needs a place to relax. Not a word about the rent the Blairs pocket from their two flats in Bristol and the £3-million town house they bought last year in London. Cherie Blair, moreover, is the first prime minister's lady to run around in an official chauffeur-driven car even for private purposes.

Other Labour ministers are trying to keep up. Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, enjoys two grace and favour homes (a fashionable London flat and a country house), and still claims nearly £18,000 for his constituency home in Blackburn. The deputy prime minister, John Prescott, does even better. He has a flat in Admiralty Arch by Trafalgar Square, a 214-acre estate (shades of Chandra Shekhar?) in Buckinghamshire, and a home in Hull known as Prescott Towers, and claims $14,000. Gordon Brown, the chancellor of the exchequer who is slated to succeed Blair as prime minister, uses his official residence at 11 Downing Street only for formal entertainment, rents a separate flat in central London to live in, and claims a little over $20,000 from the government.

As I said, we learnt all about expenses from our rulers. Now, ethnic Indians are absorbing the same rewarding lessons at the very fount of the cash polity. Two names in the list of the ten top claimants for expenses have a familiar ring. Ashok Kumar, the Labour MP for Middlesborough South and East Cleveland, is in the fourth position with a claim of £158,844. And eighth position is held by Mohammad Sarwar, also a Labour member but from Glasgow's Govan constituency, who has charged the government $155,107. South Asians are similarly prominent in the regime's roaring cash-for-honours business. The next lot of life peers will reportedly include Sir Gulam Noon of Noon Products who has given Labour £220,250 since 2001, Chai Patel of the Priory Group and founder of Care First plc, a solicitor called Mohamed Sheikh who donated £38,000 to the Conservatives, and Sandip Verma, a Leicestershire businessman who fought Wolverhampton South West for the Tories.

The scale isn't the same, of course. It's like India threatening to turf the British high commissioner out of his Delhi bungalow (which occupies military land) when the Queen sought to get back (or get more money for) the stately mansion at 9 Kensington Palace Gardens, commonly called Millionaires Row, which belongs to the royal family but where Indian high commissioners have lived ever since anyone can remember. Gracious and comfortable though the Delhi bungalow may be, there just is no comparison between the two buildings. But the principle is the same. And it originates in the British conviction that public service is not for free. The public must pay for it, and pay through the nose.

But we've beaten the British at it in one respect. Ministers and MPs might lord it here at the taxpayer's expense, but no journalist that I have ever heard of lives in subsidised government housing. The importance of Britain's fourth estate is not yet measured in terms of real estate.