Other people’s expenses claims have become a source of endless enlightenment and amusement, with a bit of genuine outrage and plenty of enjoyable faux horror.

It began with finding out that we had paid for the former Home Secretary’s family viewing habits — dreary smut and Ocean’s Eleven. Then came the tsunami of revelations about the rest of Parliament, and the still more damning evidence of what they would have “redacted”. The wave rolls on, currently with enchantingly Pooterish revelations about BBC top brass: all the more piquant as they earn many times more than MPs.

There were a handful of real abuses, close to criminality, among MPs and Lords; but the rest of it is gripping just as lifestyle voyeurism.

It is like an accident: you know you shouldn’t peer too closely yet can’t look away. Even blameless claims have an Hello! magazine fascination: why does it cost a hundred quid for a BBC controller to feed Simon Heffer (an “associate editor”) while the Deputy Director-General lunches the actual editor of the Financial Times for £12.90? I love to think of them down at the chippie, frugally agreeing to share one sachet of vinegar and a Panda cola. A “creative discussion about Newsnight”, not a meal but costing £99.85, is fascinating simply because you can’t help wondering whose creative idea fell 15p short of the full quid. And why you can’t be creative in your own office with tea bags.

As I say, hideously voyeuristic. But it is our money, and if “transparency” takes on the dubious quality of a cheap babydoll nightie, so be it. It does no public servant any harm to be tutted at for spending £647.50 on a night in the Vegas Bellagio (even if it is the hotel featured in Ocean’s Eleven, and thus possibly a desperate attempt to bond with the former Home Secretary).

But leave the big and dodgy ones to others. Transparency will wither them. The ones I really find it hard to take my eyes off are the small claims. Among the MPs it was the Maltesers, lavatory seats, the 88p bath plug. In the BBC list it is the 70p parking meters, the little leaving presents for colleagues, the cashmere socks or gin given as a gesture of (apparently personal) professional goodwill.

Of course, no employee should have to pay their way on a working trip — although some junior staff far from home do still get denied a bed — but it is legitimate for a student of humanity to brood about the mindset of a man on £211K who won’t buy his own anorak for a charity climb, at a moment when up and down the country people on a tenth of his money are cheerily pledging to Comic Relief. These things fill me not with rage but with confused pity.

I have been trying to pin down why this is so, and I think it is about what my late father — a diplomat of scorchingly severe probity — called “proper pride”. On ordinary missions for publishers, festivals, charities and so forth it feels fine to claim trains and necessary cabs, but to a well-paid person afflicted by proper pride, claiming frills feels naff. I may sweeten a three-hour journey on a lunchless day with the odd mini Jaffa Cake, but frankly that is my affair. In any normal job, workers cheerfully fork out for a leaving present or Christmas outing. If I were an MP I couldn’t have bothered with the bath plug or the bog seat; as Prime Minister I would be embarrassed to ask the taxpayer to service my Aga for 50 quid. Tony Blair did.

All this, I find on strict examination of conscience, has nothing to do with virtue and everything to do with pride. It would just feel wrong. Infantilising, babyish. I’m not rich, I have hardly any pension fund, but I am not broke. I can afford tips and oven gloves. When I am old and poor I will claim every bean, but only then.

I sympathise with the BBC man on the message board who was told off by his mate for not claiming for a £3.70 kebab in Ipswich. He is of my tribe. Humanity splits into two camps on this matter.

This meditation led on to something else inherited from that ancestral presbyterianism: a wonder at the erosion of our sense of money, worth, and earnings. The highly paid public servants anxiously filling their boots and the bankers taking mad bonuses are, psychologically, not so different from the minority who deliberately make a profession of living on benefits. They suffer from a dislocation of the age-old connection between earning, deserving, having and freely spending.

Every child knows what I mean. Elderly labourers recognise it, as do cleaners who apologise over leaving 20 minutes early and diffidently suggest you dock their pay. The “self-made men” from the North who I used to hang out with at the greyhound track felt it strongly, proclaiming: “I’ve earned my money, I’m not short, have a brandy, little lady, have a double one, no, treble, money’s nowt to me.”

A child gets paid for babysitting, and that money feels better than the Saturday pound handed over by parents. The labourer is worthy of his hire, and knows it. It is pleasant to be lordly, to know that you cannot be bothered to claw back pennies. It hangs together: work and deserving, having and spending. There is even a touch of Marx in there: “From each according to his ability” — and hey, I’m able! I can afford bath plugs!

But maybe this is becoming rarer. At one end of the scale there are people who — three generations in to a disastrous unemployment culture — really can’t see that earnings feel better than the dole, even if pound-for-pound it works out the same. Actually, I suspect that they are few, and that most claimants would rather proudly feed their own families — which is precisely why it is such a mistake to hand out benefits rather than raise the tax threshold. Far higher up the ladder there are those who do work hard, in demanding and highly paid jobs with fat pensions to come, yet lack the confidence and openhanded brio to scorn trivial claims.

It may be arrogant to stand among the scorners, and mad not to be mean. But the two camps stare at one another across a vast gulf, and neither will ever understand the other.

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