The return of Marie Antoinette

It was more than 200 years ago in France that Marie Antoinette met an untimely end when she was executed by guillotine. Among other ‘crimes’ she had made herself supremely unpopular by spending great amounts of money on herself while the people of France were suffering from desperate poverty. Thank goodness that could never happen nowadays…

This month is ‘exorbitant taxes’ month in our household. We have handed across substantial cheques for both taxes and social contributions, and we also had to pay our local taxes (taxe d’habitation and taxe fonciere).

Because of these large bills we have had to spend less than we hoped on tidying up the bathrooms in our own house. They were fitted at ‘lowest cost possible’ about five years ago and not surprisingly are now falling to bits (we had already renovated both of the gites and didn’t have too much money left for our own place).

Mrs B and the children have been complaining that it’s difficult to wash your hair at the same time as holding a shower cubicle in place with your elbow, so it is time to take action. A reasonable shower seems to cost about 700-800 euros.

So I was surprised to read that a new shower built for M Sarkozy had cost a slightly excessive £220,000. And was never even used. A £90,000 carpet and a £300,000 conference podium were also on the shopping list. (To give them credit the government later claimed that the shower cost included renovation of several other rooms at the same time.)

Was £300,000 the cheapest podium they could find? I don’t think IKEA sell podiums but I’m pretty confident a local office suppliers would have been much cheaper. It certainly makes Sir Peter Vigger’s famous floating duckhouse expenses claim of £1600 seem very reasonable.

These costs were incurred when France recently had presidency of the EU. The average country spends 70m euros to be president for six months while France managed to spend 170m euros.

Do I sense revolution in the air as we peasants hand across our hard-earned cash so that VERY GREAT LEADERS can stand behind a £300,000 podium and talk about what’s best for us? Is that the sound of a rusty guillotine being oiled that I can hear in the distance?

Next year instead of paying taxes I’m going to send a letter explaining that it was crucial that I spend the money on a nice set of barricades and two tickets for Les Miserables instead, so unfortunately there is none left for the government. That’ll teach them!