Politicians fiddled expenses because they were bored, says John Bercow

Speaker blamed the scandal on Westminster being 'less meaningful'

He said politicians were not greedy, they were simply ‘imaginative’

Claimed Parliament's role as 'effective legislature' has been in decline for decades  

Claims: Commons speaker John Bercow, pictured with wife Sally, said the scandal was a result of Westminster becoming less 'meaningful'

Politicians abused the expenses system as a ‘displacement activity’ because they were bored by an increasingly irrelevant Parliament, John Bercow has claimed.
The Commons Speaker prompted criticism when he blamed the expenses scandal on Westminster becoming less ‘meaningful’ rather than on collective ‘malice or corruption’.

The scandal has resulted in four MPs and two members of the Lords being jailed. In a speech in London, Mr Bercow played down the greed of politicians, suggesting they were simply being ‘imaginative’.

‘The blunt truth is that the expenses debacle was a particularly embarrassing layer of icing on an especially unappetising cake,’ he told political charity the Hansard Society.
‘The reality in 2009 is that the House  of Commons as a meaningful political institution … had been in decline for some decades.’ 

He added: ‘The House appeared to be little more than a cross between a rubber stamp and a talking shop which had taken to collective activity such as the imaginative interpretation of what might be a legitimate expense claim – as much as an odd form of displacement activity as out of any shared sense of malice or corruption.’

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