Parliament of spivs…

This week, the nation beholds Parliament with a collective contempt unrivalled in living memory. We need a modern-day Trollope to do justice to this wave of revulsion, triggered by the remarkable revelations in the Telegraph. Gilbert Burnet, the great ecclesiastical and political historian of his time, wrote of the corrupt MPs elected in 1710 that ‘this is the worst Parliament I ever saw’. And so it seems in 2009: the Palace of Westminster is home not to an ancient institution but to a disgraced rabble of second-rate spivs who have dishonoured the public trust as flagrantly as they have raided the public purse.

It is hard to know whether to be more outraged by the smaller, casual claims for everyday items such as biscuits and women’s toiletries or the ludicrous extravagances presented as legitimate expenses: a chandelier, for example, or the maintenance of Tory swimming pools. Labour probably comes out of the whole wretched business worse, if only because it took Gordon Brown longer than David Cameron to grasp that un-equivocal apologies were necessary. The Conservative leader’s statement on Tuesday was assured and impressive. But the Tories have dropped in the opinion polls, too. The problem is not narrowly party political. Its scope and scale are much broader than the tribal rows between Labour and Conservative.

Rarely does a political scandal truly become a crisis, but this is one such occasion. Yes, there are many individual actions which will need to be taken involving reprimand, apology, repayment, and procedural improvement. Many MPs should be individually disciplined, others deserve to be deselected, others still may find themselves the subject of criminal prosecution for abuse of the second-homes allowance or evasion of capital gains tax. Parliament will find it hard to recover as long as its Speaker is a sweaty, cantankerous shop steward such as Michael Martin.