Last updated at 15:28, Friday, 23 March 2012

Why are MPs so boorish, baying, loudmouthed and rude? Or is it too impolite of me to ask?

On Budget Day they’ll have known the eyes of the country were focused on them – probably some from around the world too. So why didn’t they have the sense to behave themselves?

All that yowling and jeering, shouting and carrying-on. Finger-pointing and snarling, I’ve seen better manners in a football crowd.

Anybody behaving that way in the Nag’s Head would be out on their ear in an instant. They’d be encouraged to make a hasty exit – or find themselves suddenly prostrate on the cobbles, shamed and fearful at the feet of that fair but firm community police officer who’s so good at sending bad boys home.

They could do with her in the House of Commons. She stands for no nonsense.

Maybe that’s what this country needs. Not a tax cut for the filthy rich, not a new tax on pensioners or 37p on a packet of cigarettes. Just somebody to show our politicians what’s what.

It must have crossed your mind too. Every time TV cameras home in on MPs doing their rowdy Westminster day job – boys and girls together in their bear pit. How did they descend to this?

Interjecting bravely (or foolishly) when happening upon a group of young lads outside the Moot Hall, yelling at each other in what is best described as less-than-friendly but overly-colourful terms, I couldn’t resist passing comment. “Hey, you guys. There’s no need for that. Can’t you keep it down?”

They did look me up and down with surprised expressions suggesting I might have been beamed in as an alien stowaway from the Starship Enterprise. But then one young chap lifted his head and spoke. It was a mumble. But it passed as speech, as he and his group shuffled off.

“Yeah, right. Sorry.”

“Thanks,” I said. And I meant it.

Now I’m kicking myself.

What I should have said was: “Stop that! Don’t you know you’re behaving like a bunch of MPs passing NHS laws or taxing old ladies?

“Carry on like that and you’ll be fit for nothing but national politics. And you wouldn’t want that now, would you?”

I reckon that might have just done the trick to focus their minds on the potential pitfalls in a life conducted without care – outside the Spar, where people can clearly see the road to ruin.

Goodness knows what happens to highly-educated, almost respectable and sometimes law-abiding men and women when they get to the House of Commons.

We voters were surely under the impression we’d been electing grown-ups when we put our crosses on ballot papers. I mean most children wouldn’t recognise an expense form, never mind know how to complete it creatively.

But regression into juvenile delinquency seems automatic on the approach to the Palace of Westminster.

See them in their constituencies at weekends and they’re as gracious as you like. Polite and accommodating. Helpful and sympathetic. I hear David Cameron even goes riding with his neighbours.

But once back in the Commons, everything changes. Yah-boo rules apply and the very people who pontificate about the antisocial behaviour of the kind of kids who yell offensively outside the Moot Hall, outstrip them disgracefully with every syllable.

Come on guys, keep it down or people will think you’re MPs. You are? Oops, sorry.

First published at 14:11, Friday, 23 March 2012
Published by http://www.cumberlandnews.co.uk