Tough times at the trough

There is something squalid about watching MPs screeching over the immediate decision to prosecute some of their number.

My sources suggest more MPs, and more particularly more peers, will be charged in the coming days and weeks. It’s clear this morning that some MPs are trying to find a way of extracting party advantage from the hysteria.

It will be confusing for many voters, that some politicians have behaved so badly that they require charging, that others have ‘paid back’ much larger sums of money and evaded any contact with the law.

One of the most mysterious aspects of the whole sage is the fact that in both the Lords and the Commons, extraordinarily wealthy people in their own right have felt it worth ‘fiddling’ their expenses to achieve such modest moneys in comparison to their vast worth.

Is this a facet of the human condition? That once you have it, you want still more?

The bits of judgement that seem to me to have been missed from Sir Christopher Kelly and Sir Tom Legg (the investigating authorities) are those that centre on the wholesale preparedness by all MPs to tolerate a system they knew was being abused (either by themselves or others); and the ‘culture of deference in parliament’.

If you go down to Westminster these days, MPs may not want to be seen much outside Parliament, but inside they still swan about the place as if it is theirs and not ours.

The current period of pain and revelation has done nothing to reduce the evidence that the culture, practice, environment, establishment of politics in Parliament require root and branch reform.

From the voting system to the all but unaccountable Executive, the need for reform is great; the chances that it will occur – all but nil.