My Second Home Is a Tent

It’s impossible to live in England today and be clueless about the Parliament members' expenses scandal, in which the MPs' second homes (they usually have one in their district and one in London) figure largely. Among the more parodied expense claims: a $2700 floating duck house for a garden, two $1 boxes of matches and a $36 toilet bowl brush.

One 300-mile commuter thinks he has an answer to the problem, and it’s not new rules and regulations — just a simple tent. Philip Hanman, a council worker who travels from his home in Penzance, Cornwall, to work in East London Tuesday to Friday doesn’t stay at a hotel. Instead he pitches a tent in Epping Forest, Essex, just outside London — and he’s challenging his local MP in Cornwall to do the same. (So far MP Andrew George, who has a $450,000 South London second home, has yet to try it, telling reporters: “Anyone who has to travel so far from their main home to their workplace should have somewhere to stay and if Mr Hanman contacted me I’d be pleased to see if his current situation could be made easier.”)

What inspired Hanman’s novel idea? Expenses — and a stint in the army. “I spent 30 years in the Territorial Army which certainly teaches you a few things about living out in the open,” Hanman told the U.K.’s Daily Mail. Of the camping experience, he said: “It has great facilities, right in the middle of the forest, surrounded by trees, rabbits, squirrels and a woodpecker or two.” Will Washington, D.C.’s National Mall become Congress’s camping grounds? Stay tuned.