State monies and shadow missions

My wife earns more than I do. I sometimes feel a worm on account of it. And other times I rationalise the income disparity. To each their own. We all make choices in life. Political, social, economic. One opts to work full-time in the formal economy. The other freelances and manages on a meagre income so that the peanuts I’m paid as a part-time teacher and newspaper columnist compensate me adequately for the pains – and pleasures – of speaking truth to power.

But when public husbands compare themselves with their wives’ pay packets earned in private out of the media’s glare, one suspects there’s more to humbling confessions than meets the eye at first glance. When the prime minister of a middle-income nation professes that he earns less than his professorial spouse, one is scarce constrained to express an opinion. (“When I want your opinion,” as the premier probably did not remark, “I’ll give it to you.”) But even though comparisons are odious, the man – no worm, him – has had the courage to come out with the truth. We have all been made to feel entitled to his opinion that this matter is, not to put too fine a point on it, a pointed matter.

When public husbands compare themselves with their wives’ pay packets earned in private out of the media’s glare, one suspects there’s more to humbling confessions than meets the eye at first glance

Of course Wickremesinghe is not one to indulge himself – or others – in games of one-upmanship for the mere exercise of making a point. It would be pointless to parade his pay packet in public, or (in the case of the remuneration of the first lady) academic. He the stalwart as always has a larger agenda to drive as much as a vested interest to further. In the national interest, not being a member of parliament so long as to be corrupted by its baser cupidity, but a sterling statesman in the making for whom money matters are of little consequence until and unless they impinge on his sense of well-being. No doubt such sea-green incorruptibles say what they mean and mean what they say about state finances. It is when comparisons between pay packets leads to conclusions about buth packets – or further free lunches for less sterling members of parliament than our Olympian – that one baulks at the prospect of pay rises.

The vexed issue of continuing and increasing pay rises for parliamentarians is by no means a foregone conclusion. Even though the parties of the third part – for once or a nonce – are in silent agreement and collusion over the matter. For not a man-jack among them disagrees that serving oneself, I mean serving one’s nation, is a costly business. It costs time, energy, and money – usually that of other people. Gone are the days when moneyed classes sought public office and funded their principles with their private purses. Today unprincipled lackeys of the powers that be seek the gratuity of the public purse to finance their private enterprises.

• That MPs would become workers, and not shirkers, overnight
• That an honest day’s work would be done, in and out of the House
• That dishonest means of earning extra cash or a fast buck would not be entertained by these princes of the people with cash to burn
• That corruption among elected representatives would suddenly become a thing of the past because parliamentarians are now flush
• That the much vaunted new political culture will emerge like a butterfly out of its chrysalis and eschew the pupa of its dead self… forever, from now on

Forgive me, my lord, for striking such an embittered posture and adopting such a cynical tone. But nothing that we’ve seen so far under the watch of you more gentlemanly leaders who now wear the purple has gone any significant length to persuade us that there has been a sea-change. Au contraire, the performance turned in by many common or garden MPs – and their lordly political masters as much as beady-eyed bureaucrats and other mandarins of state – has convinced us (well, me, at least) that this democratic-republicanism is now something rich and strange. Perhaps the greatest irony that Robespierre among other true patriots will take to their graves is that the more things change, the more they seem to stay the same… And now, like before, the public is being asked to fork out further funds for the privilege to maintain these parasites (all right, some of them) in clover.