The revelations on Civil Service pay simply confirm what I and other non-ranting commentators have said all along – that MPs are paid far too little, and the expenses farrago was brought about only by their own cowardice in not confronting an ignorant electorate over it.

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Mr Brown & Mr Cameron have no choice but to urge their MPs to cough up any amounts they are asked for by Sir Thomas Legg – because the Press will pounce on them and chew them into bite size chunks if they aren’t seen to express suitable disapproval of their misdeeds, despite the grand bogusness that flavours the whole affair.

          The print media are especially reluctant to turn their gaze on one as yet unspoken aspect of the great MPs expenses farrago. You can’t be surprised that what the Today Programme still calls Fleet Street has studiedly ignored the obvious truth that if anyone is to blame for the paying of those expenses, it is the functionaries in the Parliamentary Fees Office.

          But the members of the press – of all castes – aren’t going to ignore the few months of glory they’re enjoying, one up from the bottom rung in public popularity, where they’ve been replaced by the politicians.

          Naturally, even the dirtiest-mackintoshed little gutter hack on the Screws or the Sun well knows that the only chitties that get paid are those approved by the accounts office in accordance with whatever arcane criteria pertain. In the MPs’ case all their claims were subject to a full, professional scrutiny by staff in the fees office. By no means everything that was claimed was paid; but once it had been agreed and accepted by the fees office, it became an entirely legitimate due. Only in cases where MPs had deliberately lied or been downright fraudulent would there be justification for refusing payment. Any retrospective alteration to the terms in any comparable commercial situation, and possibly in this one, would be contestable under law.

          It’s deplorable that MPs have been so pusillanimous they couldn’t sell the electorate the idea that members of our national legislature should be paid at least as much as any competent professional. It could be, too, in the interest of good-housekeeping for us to opt for a far smaller number – like half the current crop, and less for the largely devolved parts of the Union who have their own laws to deal with  – which would allow us to pay them at least twice as much. And this would inevitably attract candidates of a considerably higher average calibre than are currently in play.

          As to blame….

This time last year, a lot of people (including me) were demanding that the criminal negligence of the bankers who had spawned the worst financial crisis in decades would not go unpunished.

It felt like a vain cry at the time, and so it turned out. Their crimes have gone almost completely unpunished – in one or two cases just slightly less lavishly rewarded – like Sir Fred Goodwin, as guilty as any banker in refusing to identify the risks his bank was taking in readily absorbing so much sub-prime debt. In every other casino in the world, the player who puts his money on red loses when black comes up. Not Sir Fred. He’s sitting on a pension fund that would support a dozen or more healthy families.

          If there is anyone to blame in the MPs’ expenses fiasco, could it be the professionals employed in the Parliamentary Fees Office, for agreeing to make the payments?

          That wouldn’t be fair. The truth is that the public is to blame for allowing themselves to be so easily whipped into a frenzy of disgust by the Daily Telegraph, the rest of Fleet Street and every political journalist in the land, not one of whom, so far as I have seen, has been prepared to acknowledge the obvious – that good legislators require good salaries, especially if we expect them to grin and bare it every time Fleet Street turns round to give their arse a good, unmerited kicking.

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Want to know who’s grassing up the MPs’ expenses to the Daily Telegraph? Of course you do!

The whisper around Canary Wharf, according to my tabloid ear-wigger, is that an individual not entirely unconnected with the fringes of the Cabinet and a European Prime Minister is the canary who sings. But why is he or she doing it?

I await/invite confirmation before I release a name.

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