When I was a humble civil servant, I was subject to a tightly administered, minimalist expenses regime. If you were away all day on departmental business, you could claim about a fiver to cover your lunch and you would need to provide a receipt in order to be reimbursed. If you were away overnight, you could go up to something over £20 (I can’t remember the exact figure, but it wasn’t a lot). Thanks to inflation, I could now have claim up to £7 for the former and £25 for the latter, along with accommodation in a modest (cheap) hotel. I’d have a whinge about it but I could see the logic. My employer was the taxpayer. Money could not be seen to be wasted. Little did I know that if the artist previously known as Prince (Andrew) claimed and was paid expenses for something wholly unconnected with his dinner, it would be all fine and dandy.
When Mr Windsor was away on business in his role as the UK’s Special Representative for International Trade and Investment he took his own entourage with him and everywhere he went he enjoyed the services of a masseuse. Well, who hasn’t? Well, me for one, but the thing is Randy Andy, as the gutter press used to call him, claimed the cost of the massages on his expenses.
I was never much of an expert on the terms and conditions manual so the idea that I could have popped in Kitty’s Magic Fingers massage parlour first thing in the morning before a hard day’s work never occurred to me. Given subsistence payments, perhaps I would have been able to claim the ‘extras’ on offer in such establishments? In my case, a bacon sarnie to set the wheels in motion would have been a welcome addition to my day.
In truth, I very much doubt that massages were available on expenses, at least officially, otherwise I might have noticed the relevant part on my expenses forms. In which case, how did Mr Windsor get reimbursed at all if it wasn’t through official expenses? Is there a secret cabal at the top of the civil service operating a slush fund in order to cover massaging? This is a serious question, almost. Does this mean that the taxpayer has been footing the bill and if so, and I am sorry to be the one who asks the question, what kind of massage services were we paying for? The picture in my mind’s eye is not a pleasant one.
The Big Picture is another thing, though. The late Queen’s ‘favourite son’ is a sleazy, pampered, arrogant, unpleasant nonce who beyond being rushed around to shake people’s hands and wave at people has never done a day’s work in his life. Quite why doing almost no work left him in need of a restorative massage is beyond me.
