MPs' expenses: shoot them or jail them – public is after revenge

It was fortunate that Andrew MacKay did not encounter one of his elderly constituents when the Conservative MP defied growing public fury to show his face in Bracknell town centre yesterday.

"I can see ordinary people going round with shotguns and shooting them all," said a pensioner in this industrious Berkshire town. She was so enraged by MPs' expenses, she said, that she was tempted to shoot the Speaker herself.

The days when Dick Turpin reputedly rested up in a pub where this new town now sprawls have long gone. But voters outside Westminster are increasingly convinced that their representatives have got away with daylight robbery.

As Keith Rogers put it in Sleaford, where Conservative MP Douglas Hogg belatedly agreed to pay back £2,200 spent cleaning his moat: "This is not politics. It's theft. MPs' allowances are more than most people's wages in Lincolnshire."

When MPs returned to their weekly surgeries and other duties in their constituencies yesterday, they encountered a landscape transformed by revelations about their expenses. The cynicism of many voters towards Westminster had been replaced by something much more engaged, but also far more enraged.

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