With Wendy Alexander now no longer Labour leader in Scotland for failing to declare a donation and Tory chairman, Caroline Spelman
in deep trouble over expenses, and the role of her nanny, you may reasonably think I've flipped.

In my defence, I would point out that all is not lost. A Yorkshire MP, David Davis, has resigned on principle, perhaps at the expense of a glittering career, to fight for civil liberties. Admittedly, my case would be stronger if he faced some serious opposition. But we can't have everything.

Nor can MPs, even if their remuneration system seems to give them all that, with jam and cream on top.

But that does not mean that we should fund our representatives at Westminster as badly as we support our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. We should treat both fairly.

Just as we need to repair the covenant between the nation and its Armed Forces, so we need a new compact between electors and elected.

Given their responsibilities, however reduced by Brussels,
we do not pay our MPs extravagantly at £61,820, especially if we want them to concentrate full-time on the job instead of topping up their earnings and experience
outside in the real economy – as we seem to do by allowing them ever more closely to align Parliamentary hours with 9-5 penpushing.

That salary, as determined by a review body, is roughly mid-point in the Civil Service pay scale. Many believe that few MPs could earn that much in the private sector. But that begs the question as to what
kind of person we want to represent us. On this, there is manifestly no agreement.

Constituency selection committees, where they are not contemptibly required to discriminate in favour of women or ethnic minorities, seem only too willing to choose candidates who have done nothing in their lives other than play party political games.


We can't exactly blame MPs for being useless lobby fodder when we have selected sub-standard, narrowly focused political apparatchiks instead of more independent people of the world.

So, I am not disposed to argue about our MPs' basic salary. Nor is there any case for denying those representing constituencies outside London support for what is described as a second home. They need somewhere to live during the week.

It might be cheaper to pay hotel bills, especially as they now spend only half their time at Westminster. But the £23,000 annual allowance (now to be replaced by £19,600, plus £4,200 a year no-questions-asked subsistence) to meet the cost of running a London home cannot, properly
policed, provide luxury.

Unfortunately, in the absence of tough scrutiny and clear rules, MPs, being human, have shown that the old Fleet Street did not have a monopoly on works of imaginative art in the form of expenses claims. The exploitation of the panoply of allowances, aided by the laxity or timidity of the authorities, is by no means new.

Consequently, MPs have appeared to set less and less of an example for probity the more we have effectively demanded, through the Freedom of Information Act, media exposure of their ingenuity in exploiting the public purse.

This is extremely bad for our democracy. Tomorrow's proposals will not do much to improve matters in spite of new demands for receipts and the introduction of spot and other checks.

In future, MPs may not be able to claim for furniture, TV sets or for kitchens, bathrooms and other renovations on what has been called the John Lewis list of acceptable second home expenditure. But the transparency necessary to restore the reputation of our MPs is simply not going to be provided.

We may know something of what will not be tolerated. But we don't know what will be accepted or how rigorously the checks will be carried out and the rules policed.

I would be more impressed if they were proposing to ditch Jack Straw's iniquitous £10,000 communications allowance supposedly to help with communicating Parliamentary business to the public. Apart from inviting the abuse of public funds for party political purposes, it is a disgraceful and grossly unfair built-in advantage for sitting MPs.

Tomorrow, those MPs who value their reputations should tell Mr Speaker to think again and come up with clear, simple, defensible and enforceable rules – and make sure they are enforced.