If this were replicated in an election (of course, it won’t be, but the illustration is still valid), it would result, according to the BBC website’s calculator, in 530 seats for the Liberal Democrats in the House of Commons — a majority of 410 seats: a landslide beyond all conception and all precedent.

Liberal Democrats were, of course, looking for Clegg to make up ground tonight. Brown is generally considered to be undervalued and Cameron overvalued, a view not supported by tonight’s public response. Conventional wisdom suggested that Clegg needed to be up with the others, and it would do Lib Dems good because of the exposure. But the scale of the Nick Clegg result was absolutely devastating: an absolute majority of votes in one poll, an equal vote with the other two parties combined in the other.

Where did the debate landslide victory come from?

There were three factors, I think.

First, Nick Clegg made a point of answering the question. I followed the BBC comments page while watching the debate, and — leaving aside the obviously partisan comments — this was commented on again and again. He not only answered the question, but made a point of looking at and referring to the questioner to see if they thought he was answering the questions. Brown famously jibed at Cameron ‘this is answer time, not question time’, and, certainly, Cameron’s unwillingness to give an actual answer told against him. But Brown’s own attempts fell flat as well. My feeling is that Brown really was trying to answer the questions from time to time, but he was held up by his own opaque language: beginning a sentence with “Net inward immigration…” three times does not make for a good connection with viewers.

Second, the Lib Dem manifesto published this week was a clear winner in terms of the power it gave to Clegg over the other two. The manifesto sets out in detail exactly what the Lib Dems would spend and what they would save. Neither Labour nor the Tories — as Clegg pointed out — included figures in their manifestos. Cameron tried to have a bit of a go about the figures, but it is never easy to argue with a man on his own turf: Clegg knew his manifesto and his figures much better than Cameron did, and Brown made no attempt to overturn the Lib Dem figures at all.

Third, Nick Clegg positioned his two opponents very clearly in his own address as the ‘same old same old parties’. The bickering between Brown and Cameron which followed underlined that again and again. Clegg certainly benefited from the game that Brown and Cameron tried to play. They were almost deferential in their treatment of him, and when Cameron did attempt to question Clegg, it fell rather flat, especially on immigration, which should have been his strongest suit. Brown again and again tried to say that he and Clegg were agreeing. Unfortunately for him, Clegg refused to play along. This was all especially important because, at Prime Minister’s Question Time, the bulk of Tory/Labour jeers are often enough to drown out Clegg’s comments. In a studio, with a studio audience and clear rules, this extraneous factor was taken away.

What difference will all this make? That remains to be seen — over the next few days, as the pundits weave their theories, and as the spin-doctors from left and right attempt to demonstrate (as William Hague is already attempting) that, despite all the opinion polls, their candidate won after all.

There may be more polls tomorrow, and they may give a different result. But, for now, based on this debate only, and without any particular connection with other realities, the result is a clearer victory for Nick Clegg than any Liberal Democrat could have hoped for.

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• Tony Blair was elected in 2005. Gordon Brown was never elected, neither by the UK population, nor even by his own party, as no-one stood against him and he won the contest by default when Blair stood down.
• The expenses scandal, though run as a major newspaper publishing venture by the Daily Telegraph, was actually the fruit of years of work by Heather Brooke.
• Michael Martin was the first speaker of the House of Commons to be forced to resign since Sir John Trevor in 1695
• More MPs will stand down at this election than any other since the end of the second world war. 200 are expected to stand down, including John Maples, MP for Stratford-on-Avon, who announced his intention on 10 January.
• Contrary to popular opinion, this is not the longest parliament in recent memory. Five years and one day will have elapsed between this election and the last one. John Major’s term was ended by the election on 1 May 1997, five years and 21 days after he won on 9 April 1992. Margaret Thatcher’s 1987 to 1992 was also longer than this sitting. Prior to that, the longest sitting since the war was 8 October 1959 to 15 October 1964. However, although there can be a gap of more than five years between the elections, the maximum length of a parliament itself is 5 years.

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But the elephant in the room (this cliché has become very common recently) is the question of what MPs actually do. Cabinet ministers, of course, run government departments. Sort of. Actually, civil servants run government departments, and cabinet ministers (if they are wise) set policy or (if foolish) get involved in top-level executive decisions. Junior ministers, naturally, do what their senior colleagues do, but less so. The opposition is there to hold the government to account, and back-benchers of the government are… well… to provide the necessary support for the government to be a government.

If MPs are merely voting fodder or some kind of inspection agency, then their senior-management level salaries look a bit over-priced. Some MPs ask barely more than one or two parliamentary questions a year — not the sort of thing which holds anyone to much account. There are All Party Parliamentary Groups on a wide variety of subjects, ranging from human trafficking (a substantially overlooked topic) to beer, a subject which is seldom overlooked. However, these APPGs have no direct influence on the activity of government. There are also select committees, which form part of the process of law-making. But, again, quite a few MPs are not members of any select committees. These are typically the MPs who ask the fewest parliamentary questions.

Members of Parliament have, at least since the war in most areas, supplemented their parliamentary duties with constituency duties. These range from holding surgeries as semi-surrogate social workers, to an endless round of openings and parties. MPs also respond to constituents’ letters, and raise issues of importance with local government. But, again, they raise issues, but have no direct authority. Naturally, in a public sector organisation, a letter from an MP carries a certain weight. But only a certain weight. It is soft influence, not hard impact.

Ask a member of the public exactly what an MP does, and you may get a fairly vague answer. Ask an MP what MPs do, and the answer can be equally vague. To restore trust in politicians, we need job descriptions.

To someone who has lived without one, a job description may seem threatening. MPs have muttered about the unfairness of being told what to do, and how to live. The phrase ‘living on rations’ has cropped up.

But the truth is, the entirely unregulated life of an MP can be as bad for them as it is for the people they serve. A friend of mine was told by his doctor that if he did not stand down as MP for a seat he had famously won a few years before, then he would be dead in five years. Endlessly late nights, a culture which emphasises alcohol consumption, and a demanding programme which is effectively a 40 hour week in Westminster supplemented by a 40 hour week in the constituency, is not good for the MP, nor is it good for the decisions they should be making on our behalf. There is a reason why good companies do not let their senior managers overwork — overworked managers gain progressively fewer results the longer they extend their hours.

The other benefit of a really clear job description is that, if an MP fails in it, he or she could actually be removed. The ability for the electorate to remove failing MPs is part of Liberal Democrat national policy. An MP who seldom turns up at the House of Commons, is rarely in the constituency, and whose letters are written by a team of poorly paid researchers working from a fairly elementary rule-book, is not earning the money we pay them. Worse, he or she is preventing a more diligent, hard-working person from representing the voters.

It is no surprise that all of the worst excesses of the expenses scandal were in ‘safe’ seats. An MP with no accountability framework, no means of removal, and no likelihood of even having to campaign hard when the General Election is called can casually disregard his or her duty. And, it seems, some, or even many, did.

Job descriptions, then. A simple summary of hours to be worked, outputs to be measured, methods of accountability, common standards and disciplinary procedures. Businesses discovered them decades ago. It’s time for the elected-sector to make its way into the late 20th century. Perhaps as a step (heaven help them) into the 21st.

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Actually, we don’t have to have any of these things, and in 2010, we are in a position to demand better.

MPs are only beginning to get the message that they can no longer get away with it in the way they once did. Even that really only applies to expenses. I discovered recently that one MP was writing to newspapers to praise himself for not having to repay expenses, while at the same time making a profit of £1 million on a second home whose mortgage had been paid by the taxpayer. Clearly, he still believes he can get away with the second part, as long as he isn’t stained by the first. Some MPs appear to believe that they can conceal their background of privilege. Others appear to believe that past criminal behaviour will never come to haunt them. Many seem to think that a safe-seat means the electorate will never hold them to account for any of it.

In 2010, we can demand better. And we should. Letters to the MP. Letters to the local newspaper. Reminding ourselves and our friends that we don’t have to put up with it. Changing the way we vote.

The bi-polar parliamentary system ensures there is little continuity from election to election. Even a party winning a second term can abandon the promises of its first term on the grounds that it has sought a new mandate for a new manifesto. More importantly, although it will probably be blamed for things which it does which later turn out poorly, it can almost guarantee not to be blamed for things which it doesn’t do. We are only in the situation regarding climate change now because successive governments did nothing. In the 1980s, instead of using North Sea oil money to build an infrastructure which no longer relied on fossil fuels, we spent the money getting ourselves out of recession and back into boom-and-bust. True, at the time we were mainly worried about when the oil ran out, and to a lesser extent about pollution. But both of those, if acted upon, would have been enough to help us stave off the catastrophe our grandchildren will now face. We don’t have to have two big parties which hate each other and use every opportunity to ridicule each other and scupper one another’s plans. Of course, any attempt to change this is met with the argument “this is how things have to work”. But they don’t. Other countries, not just the ones we tell jokes about, have multi-party systems, and parties and politicians are held responsible over the course of several parliaments.

In 2010, we can insist on grown-up politics. We can demand that our elected leaders work together for the common good. We do not have to tolerate bickering in the House of Commons. Once again, it will only change if we make sure our politicians know that it is what we expect and demand.

We now face the prospect of a General Election whose result may well be decided by ten or so swing seats up and down the country. No party is predicted to get anywhere near 50% of the vote. But one party or another may well discover it can form a government based on how many of those swing seats go which way. Those ten seats have, between them, less than a million voters. Turnout is likely to be around 70%. The winner in each of those seats will probably be winning with 35-45 per cent of the votes cast. The actual majority is liable to be 3-5 per cent in each of those seats. Which means that the fate of 61 million people may be settled by the swing votes of less than 100,000 people. In other words, less than 2% of the voters will decide the fate of all of us.

We all laughed at the way George W Bush won his first term despite the fact that most people voted for his opponent. But our system is more laughable than that.

We almost certainly do have to put up with this in 2010. We do not have to put up with afterwards. Again, change will only happen if we make it clear that this is what we want, and we are prepared to change our votes to get it.

In 2010, we can demand better. And we owe it to ourselves to do so.

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Given that Major’s men were up to their tricks throughout the 1990s, and the current crop of Expenses-scandal-sleaze MPs had been doing what they did since either the 1990s, or whenever they got elected, where did politics go wrong?

It’s a common misconception (pushed forward by those who hope to survive the storm) that it was the system which made MPs claim expenses to which they were not entitled. But this is manifestly untrue. No system makes people act in a dishonest way. Nobody was forced to break the law by claiming for mortgages which did not exist, nobody was forced to break the explicit parliamentary rule that expenses should not be managed in order to render a profit at the tax-payer’s expense, and nobody was forced to use the expenses system to claim for excesses such as moat cleaning, duck houses, and limed oak toilet seats (even as I write this one, I’m forced to think ‘did this really happen?’ Apparently, it did).

Also, how is it that so many of them did it? It’s been pointed out (by me, among other people) that the majority of MPs were not engaged in these practices. But a sufficiently large minority from all three parties (including my own, though to a lesser degree) have done so that the entire class of MPs is not merely under suspicion, but under complete derision.

Political parties are now changing the way in which they assess and select parliamentary candidates. But it’s fair to say that, in the 1990s and 2000s, candidates were not being assessed on the trustworthiness, although (especially in the ‘spin’ years), parties have always been interested in credibility.
So, what’s the difference?
Credibility is whether or not you appear trustworthy to people. Politicians with no interest in football have been told to bone up on the off-side rule in order to appear more credible in urban constituencies. Politicians who live in London but are standing in far-flung rural areas (ie, anywhere outside the M25 that is not 90% urban) are photographed in Barbour jackets. People change their accents, go through teeth-whitening procedures (because people with whiter teeth tell fewer lies… right), and discover obscure ancestries which link them to the constituency. Every ‘parachute’ candidate rents a flat where they intend to stand. Credibility can be bought for the right price with the right advice. It doesn’t always work — we all remember William Hague’s reverse base-ball cap, and David Cameron being photographed cycling to work, followed by a van full of his papers. But, despite these minor mishaps, David Cameron at least has shed most of the Eton / Oxford exclusive dining club / millionaire image that he grew up with.

Trustworthiness is something quite different. Self-evidently, many of the people we trusted were not worthy of our trust.

So, where do we go from here?

If we really want trustworthy politicians, we need to start voting for them. I think it’s fair to say that the big political parties have not got the message. There has not been a flurry to find candidates who are more honest than those of previous generations. The all-women, all-ethnic minority shortlist talk is not about increasing trustworthiness, but about increasing the overall credibility of the party that shortlists them. Actually, a desire to increase credibility without a search for honesty is a mark of the deepest untrustworthiness. Or bad faith, as we used to call it. But the big parties are counting on the public voting on party, political or tribal lines, not lines of trust. They believe that, after we’ve had our rant, we will still lump all politicians together as necessary evils, and get on with voting for the ones we would have voted for anyway. Therefore, we need to disappoint them, and severely.

But, given that every politician will be coming to us at the election with the claim that they are more trustworthy than the others, and given that the richest and best connected will be able to have the best advice and be able to buy the best services, how can we tell?

Here are my thoughts:
1) What did they do before politics?
People who have served the public, perhaps in charities, in the armed forces, in the muckier bits of the public sector, have a very different track record from those who made a killing in the city or played around with inherited wealth before being given a safe-seat. That doesn’t mean that people who work in the city are not trustworthy, or that inherited wealth makes people liars, but a track record of service in the past goes a long way towards underlining a promise that they will serve us in the future.

2) How hard did they have to work to get here?
The vast majority of expenses-scandal MPs have been in what are generally termed ‘safe-seats’. Check out someone’s political track-record. Have they faced disappointment and defeat in the past, or have they been handed easy victories? Easy victories don’t make someone untrustworthy, but the majority of those who cheated did have big majorities to shore them up.

3) Where does their money come from?
People whose every working hour is given to becoming richer are unlikely to give up the habit when they get elected. More importantly, there are some ways to get rich, or, get by, which are in the public interest, and some which are predatory in nature. Someone who trades on other people’s greed, weakness or ignorance in order to gain their money is unlikely to be trustworthy in parliament.

4) For sitting MPs, what have they done?
The ideal MP works hard, claims only reasonable expenses, and arranges their affairs so that there is not even a suggestion that they may be profiting at the public expense. If your MP is seldom in the House of Commons, has claimed extravagantly, or has made a fortune through publicly-funded property speculation, then there is very little reason to believe that they will change their ways in the next parliament.

5) What’s their position on second jobs?
Will your candidate be dedicating his or her paid time exclusively to the House of Commons, or will that time be shared with company directorships, business dealings, lobbying firms and lucrative contracts? The rules, it appears, will not be changing to ensure that they do not, so it’s a good indicator of just how trustworthy they really are. For sitting MPs, you can easily check the register. For candidates, you can write to them or ask them at a public meeting whether they will be retaining any of these income streams, and whether they can guarantee to make the House of Commons their sole source of income. Taking a second job does not make someone necessarily untrustworthy, but, if someone is promising to dedicate their life to serving you in the next parliament, you can legitimately question how much time that will leave them for other things.

6) How do they respond to criticism?
No-one likes being criticised, but it’s instructive to see how people behave when they are accused of an impropriety. Some people flare up, some people become very sad, some people become very earnest. All of these are normal reactions. But some people demonstrate consummate skill in deflecting the criticism. This isn’t necessarily a sign that they are untrustworthy, but, taken with the other indicators, it can reenforce what you already know. Jack Straw, who isn’t from my party, always gets very agitated when people criticise him on Radio 4. A friend of mine who worked with him tells me that he is, in person, very trustworthy. Peter Mandelson, from that same party, is always very smooth in the face of criticism. Partly that’s his job, but, equally, the word is that he is not necessarily the first person you would want to trust.

7) How hard do they try to be credible?
Finally — and for this you need to really meet them and look them in the eye — how hard are they trying to be credible? You probably won’t be able to tell if they’ve had their teeth whitened (some people have naturally white teeth), but, when you talk to them, if you move off the usual subjects, you can get a fairly good impression about whether they are happy to talk about anything, or always want to move the conversation back to them, their credibility, the uncredibility of other candidates, the sins of other parties. Anyone who is too desperate to have you trust them — like a car salesman who keeps saying “I’ll be honest with you” — is probably not someone you should be trusting. Again, some people are naturally eager to make friends. But, generally, those people are more natural at it.

I don’t want to suggest that everyone who fails these tests is a liar, and, I’m sure, there are people even now coaching would-be MPs about how to pass these tests, or others like them. But, if we have no tests, then we are left only with what the candidates tell us about themselves. With their credibility, not their trustworthiness. If you don’t like these, then write down what things would make you trust or distrust someone. But do it, and then vote on it.

Otherwise, as we enter the 2010s, rather than the government we really want, we will once again elect the government we deserve.

Coda
Many people will wish to point out that the decade ends at the end of 2010, and the new decade begins in 2011. I do agree with them. However, the arbitrary decade beginning with the year 2000, which was celebrated (somewhat bizarrely), as the Millennium (bizarrely because, notwithstanding questions about year 0, nothing in particular happened in the Year 1000 for us to commemorate) has reached an end, and it is that decade which I am describing.

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What kinds of Prime Minister are there? I made a little list: Leaders, Managers, Administrators, and Caretakers.

Gordon Brown is a caretaker. He came in at the dog-end of the Blair years, and was instantly faced with crisis after crisis. The poor man has never got his head above water. The things he did well (the Millennium debt campaign, for example) are all forgotten about. Nobody can really point to anything he has done especially badly. It’s just that crises gather round him and he doesn’t seem to have the power to sort them out and get on with his real agenda. In fact, more than anything else, the public’s un-love affair with Gordon is based on him not having an agenda at all.

John Major was an administrator. Aside from the personal things (you can imagine him carefully filling in all the forms, and frowning when anyone had written in the space marked ‘do not write in this space’), his approach to Britain was to carefully make sure that we were fulfilling expectations, doing our duty, moving the agenda long in safe increments. But it wasn’t his agenda, and, since he’d been voted in because he wasn’t Thatcher, it wasn’t her agenda either. Really, it was the ‘Victorian values’ agenda — harking back to a time when politicians were good, and the people were good, and Britain could be proud of its place in the world, because it was good. John Major never went to university (he did a correspondence course in banking instead). If he had done, he would probably have discovered that history is not quite as simple as he thought it was, and that nostalgia is not all it used to be.

Cameron wants to be a manager. ‘Let us look after the economy, and we’ll do it somewhat better’, is his appeal to the electorate. I’m reminded of a story I read about a new manager who arrived at a company and found three envelopes on his desk, with a note: “If things are not going well after three months, open envelope 1. If things are not going well after six months, open envelope 2. If things are not going well after nine months, open envelope 3.” After three months, things were not going well, so he opened envelope 1. Inside was a note, which said “Blame your predecessor.” After six months, he felt obliged to open envelope 2. Inside, the note said: “Predict that things will shortly get better.” He duly did so. However, as things still did not improve, he found himself opening envelope 3 after nine months. The note inside was terse: “Prepare three envelopes”.

The ever fickle public may well believe that Cameron could not possibly do it worse than Brown, and may want to give him a chance. I have to say, I think that that confidence is misguided. But Cameron has no compelling vision of the future of Britain, and absolutely no vision at all of the future of politics in Britain. He wants to keep as much of the system intact as he can in the face of the overwhelming public hatred for the political class and their expenses. He will duck and dive and say all the right things. But Cameron will not be any kind of a reforming leader, and, to give him his due, he has never promised to be. If elected (and contacts in Mori are now saying it is unlikely he will obtain a sufficient majority), he will be blaming Brown after three months and after six predicting recovery.

Tony Blair, of course, saw himself as a great leader. As did Margaret Thatcher. But, of course, both of them led us into trouble. Thatcher established greed as the one great spiritual value of the nation and tried to turn it into policy with the poll tax, charging people based not on their ability to pay, but on the simple fact of their existence. Blair led us straight into the arms of George W Bush, and thence into the Iraqi desert. Leaders will be judged by history more strictly than managers, administrators and caretakers. It’s probably fair to say of John Major that he did no real harm, and of Brown that he did no real anything.

However, this is not the time for a caretaker, or an administrator, or even a manager. The expenses scandal is not the cause of what is wrong with politics, it is merely a symptom of it. For years the role of the MP has become steadily less clear and less valuable. Prime ministers have become more presidential, cabinet has become steadily less answerable to parliament. When I was small, ministers resigned when their departments blundered. These days, they simply blame officials and sack them.

In the mean time, parliament has increasingly realised that all it actually does is make or block legislation, and play a supporting role to the government-opposition media prize fight. Unsurprisingly, we have ever more laws, and yet no greater justice. MPs talk constantly about efficiency savings that could be made, but every bill they pass makes life more complicated and requires the creation of more jobs to administer and supervise it. And, before we see that as some kind of useful job-creation, the people who really have the ability to manage such new laws would be better employed applying their talents to the great problems of state.

I do not remotely condone the misuse of tax-payers’ money (and, more importantly, the misuse of power and privilege which we the citizen voted them in for). But I understand why some MPs, arriving perhaps full of ideals only to discover that their significance in a stitched-up secret society is essentially zero, would then look around for something else to do. The devil has indeed made work for idle hands. Or, if not the devil, Mrs Thatcher, who, to support her articulation of greed as the basic principle of the economy, created a system which rewarded inventiveness and brazenness at the expense of public duty and honesty.

People are talking about a March election suddenly. Of course, Cameron is talking it up, because he knows that the sooner the election, the less chance that he or his party will have been caught saying or doing something really stupid. But the larger question goes unanswered: just what exactly are we electing? What is an MP’s job description? What are the hours? What are the duties? What constitutes a legitimate expense and what is simply misconduct. More importantly, what is the role of the House of Commons? Clearly not to scrutinise — the House of Lords does that, and, despite the archaic system, is more effective in doing it, because it has a robust group of cross-benchers and independently-minded lords political who ensure that it is not simply the whipping dog of the party in power. Hopefully not to generate yet more regulation and legislation. We have — in many parts of our life together — moved to the point where we are no longer protecting people, but actively curtailing their legitimate life aspirations.

Liberal Democrats may have been a voice crying in the wilderness for a long time, arguing that politics should be changed, that the safe-seat system (which is at the heart of the vast majority of the really serious expenses breaches) needs to be abolished and every vote should be counted, not just the few that are cast by floating voters in a vanishingly small number of swing seats, arguing that MP expenses should be made public, and for an end to Punch-and-Judy two-party politics. A voice crying in the wilderness, but the wilderness is now at our doorstep.

When leadership is needed, we would do best to those who have been pointing the way consistently throughout their careers, not those who jumped when the bandwagon suddenly became popular.

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Essentially — if you don’t have time to read the 139 page report — Christopher Kelly recommends reducing the allowances MPs can claim, preventing them from claiming for mortgages, and cutting down what MPs near London are allowed to get. But he does nothing to stop MPs earning lucrative amounts through second incomes, and he does absolutely nothing whatever to require MPs to work a certain number of hours in return for their annual salary or to deliver achievements or outcomes. In this way, parliament remains a ‘gentlemen’s club’, where those with substantial external earnings are little harmed by the new arrangements, and where there is no accountability, beyond the once in five years popularity contest of the General Election which has more to do with competing party promises than with the MP’s own track record.

Kelly entirely dodges the question of external earnings. In noting that he intends to recommend no change, he trots out the tired excuse: “It can bring valuable experience to the House of Commons and the income from it can help to preserve independence from the whips.” ((page 11))

But this flies in the face of a principle which Kelly references repeatedly — bringing MP’s remuneration closer to the expectations of their constituents. Normally, if a constituent works a responsible full-time job, their contract will stipulate what external employment they are allowed to hold, and how potential conflicts of interest with their main employment should be managed.

The problem with MPs having external interests is that MPs get to vote on absolutely everything. No aspect of British society is outside of parliament’s discussions. True, MPs are required to declare an interest when the debate explicitly touches on their directorships. But a debate may implicitly touch on many areas, and no interest declared.

Further, there are a number of professions and commercial interests which could be legitimately considered to be against the public interest. I have the greatest, deepest admiration for Tory MP Kenneth Clarke in much of what he does (and, really, has he not realised yet he is in the wrong party?), but a directorship of British American Tobacco surely flies in the face of widely accepted public priorities. Equally, we have MPs who benefit (or who have benefitted in the past) from the operation of fee-charging cash machines, which sap the resources of deprived communities where banks are unwilling to place the free ATMs common in affluent areas.

There are a large number of businesses which, while not illegal, are predatory in nature. What’s more, there are changes to society which benefit legitimate business, but whose benefit to society as a whole is altogether more questionable. Churches and many voluntary groups, as well as trades unions, opposed the Thatcher-sponsored Sunday trading bill. Sunday trading — if it did anything — fuelled the growth in consumer spending and thus consumer debt which is a key factor in the boom-bust cycle which has left our economy reeling. Many of the MPs (in fact, probably most) who voted for that bill gained substantially from it, through their external interests.

Kelly’s claim “the income from it can help to preserve independence from the whips”, is particularly disturbing. If the standard remuneration for MPs is not enough to preserve their independence from whips, then there is something fundamentally wrong with the framework Kelly is proposing. Worse, it means that new MPs, or MPs from backgrounds that do not privilege them with access to directorships, are ‘whip-fodder’.

The other enormous problem with Kelly’s prescription is that it changes the remuneration of MPs without making any assessment of what it is that MPs are actually supposed to do. How often should an MP attend parliament? How many parliamentary questions should they ask? How much constituency work? How many letters should they answer themselves, compared to the number which are answered by their researchers?

Should MPs have performance related pay? How would that performance thus be measured? It would certainly offset the time that MPs with outside interests put into earning their extra money.

David Cameron has expressed the view that there should be fewer MPs. Why? What benefit would that be? If we are really concerned about saving a few million pounds, then we should perhaps be looking at the £100,000 a year that relatively minor but senior civil servants get. There are very few MPs by comparison, and they earn far less. Cameron of course is making this suggestion because it sounds contrite, honest and cost-saving. But it is nonsense, as is any attempt to set the amount that MPs get paid (including their expenses) without setting out their duties and hours of work.

If we really want to sort out the complete mess which parliament is now in, and if we really want to make the work of an MP transparent — understandable to someone who does a regular job, for a regular wage — then we need to give MPs contracts like any job gives its employees. They should set out how many hours, what outcomes, how the work is to be measured. And if we really mean to modernise, then there should be a mechanism for throwing an MP out if they fail to live up to not only the basic ethical standards, but also the basic work, that we would expect from any other employee.

Because, ultimately, MPs are our employees.

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Originally put forward in a Wired Magazine article, and subsequently in a book by Jeff Howe, crowdsourcing harnasses the skills of the many (as opposed to — dare we say it in this context? — the lust for blood of the mob) to analyse data or to chew over a problem. In this particular case, Guardian readers, and, we can assume, other bloggers and webites, have been combing through the now-published MP expenses data. Despite the blanking out of crucial data, crowdsourcers have already begun to build up powerful profiles of who is spending how much on what.

More important than the actual method used — although it is important — is the fact that all this user-researched data means that finally we, the people, have access to our MPs’ expenses claims, not in driblets issued by the Daily Telegraph to further its own ill-concealed political agenda, nor in the avalanche of mind-numbing detail on which civil servants and politicians have been counting to put us off looking, but in clear, concise analysis, which can be checked by anyone who wants to.

This is what Freedom of the Press is all about — the freedom for any newspaper, or, in this blogging age, any citizen-journalist, to look at the facts for themselves, come to a conclusion, and put forward their own interpretation. Suddenly we are no longer in the hands of a journalistic-elite, themselves under the thumb of a right-wing editor.

This freedom has come too little too late. Too late for Cameron’s ‘old-guard’, who are set to be swept away in sweeping purges. And certainly too late for us collectively to have any faith in the financial probity of our politicians. And too little to set our minds at ease that now everything is in the open and nothing is being hidden. If you haven’t looked at the MP expenses yourself yet, then do. There is something uniquely terrifying about the way in which whole sections have been blacked out, with (crucially, in my mind) no annotations to indicate the reason for the black out nor the text minus the offending details. Nothing is more compelling in telling us that our interests are deemed as less important than those of an MP. Even though any private detective could dig up the real information (or just buy it from the Telegraph) without a great deal of difficulty.

Guardian readers have so far crawled through 700,000 heavily edited documents. The degree of scrutiny they have brought to it is vastly more than the Telegraph’s — in fact, we now wonder if the Telegraph was not tipped off to go straight for the juicier items, since they, in passing, overlooked so many other interesting things.

More to the point, though, is that the Guardian readers are enabling information to be aggregated. We know now that the Tories claim the most for food. But the aggregations also allow us to compare MP total costs for various things with their actual performance in the House of Commons, thanks to a little additional cross-referencing with TheyWorkForYou.Com.

Once MP second job information is published at the start of July, we will be in a position to see a league table of MP value for money. It will not placate the public. But it may give some old, recalcitrant and now entirely embittered MPs the push they need to, in the time honoured phrase, ‘pursue career interests elsewhere’.

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The issue is not that ‘bed-blockers’, as they are rather unceremoniously being referred to, should not be moved on. Actually, I would favour a system which created incentives for those whose political careers had essentially finished to vacate the House of Commons. Rather, it is that David Cameron has unmasked himself as an old-fashioned opportunist, willing to make the most of the old proverb about ill-winds, in order to turn a national crisis of trust into a boost for his own personal power.

Tony Blair accomplished something rather of the same sort when he faced down the Clause 4 people. But he did it rather better, and he did it very honestly, and a lot of people who disliked his policy admired his courage in doing so. Lest we forget, this is the Tony Blair before he became Prime Minister who was going to go on to rescue Labour from an 18 year electoral drought.

Are Old Tories the problem? Would the world be a better place if they were entirely replaced by New Tories? It seems to me self-evident that there is value in a mixed House of Commons — not all old, but not all young either. Not all worn-down by experience, but not all fresh-faced and accident-prone either. To my mind — though this is perhaps uncharitable — the acquisition of power and the exercise of its privileges, notwithstanding the opinions of the taxpayer, are the hallmarks of what the Conservative Party has always stood for. Under Thatcher the promise was that a greater and greater proportion of the population would enter this privileged state, which was the promise that lured Middle Britain (coupled with Labour’s abject failure in the Winter of Discontent). Lured it, and kept is skewered. Cameron may wish to take the Conservatives away from their past (although, one wonders, in what sense would they still be ‘conservatives’ if he did), but it is not enough to simply lead people away from something. One must lead them into something else. And it is this ‘something else’ which Cameron has failed to articulate.

To listen to him, one would imagine that New Conservatives are a posh branch of the Liberal Democrats. Green, clean, reformist, interested in the common man. The sort of local party you find in Winchester or Harrow. But — if you read Conservative Home — there seems to be no spirit of warming to the actual Liberal Democrats. The ‘Limp Dems’, they like to call us, accusing us of underhand tactics with out ‘Lib Dems winning here’ campaigns. Hatred of the Lib Dems seems to burn hotter than at any time since the 1930s.

There was a very clear neo-conservative ideology — almost a theology — set out in the Reagan-Bush years, and applied in the subsequent George W years. But that ideology is now largely identified with the trickle down approach of Thatcher-Reagan, and is surely one of the things that Cameron is trying to get away from. There was an older, kinder conservative ideology in the days of Ted Heath. But Cameron is clearly not advocating returning to that.

If he’s leading them forwards, where is ‘forwards’? According to Eric Pickles, 3,000 ordinary members of the public have written to him asking to be Conservative MPs. Evidently, those are 3,000 members of the public who believe they can do a better job than the current Conservative MPs. But what do those 3,000 believe? Do they believe anything, or have they concluded that the life of an MP is so easy that they have all the qualities needed, and ideology can be sorted out later. Because, truly, David Cameron has not told us what kind of Conservative party he expects, except that it will be a ‘better’ one. He has not told us what kind of MPs he expects, except that they will be more ‘honest’. He has not told us what kind of country he would like Britain to become. In as much as he has told us anything, it is contradictory. A Britain where taxes are lower, but spending is the same as Labour’s. A Britain which is more inclusive, but at the same time more anti-foreigner (or, at least, anti-European). A Britain which doesn’t allow banks to pull the economy down, but which simultaneously allows them to ‘flourish’ with less red-tape. Perhaps it is unfair to hang on Mr Cameron the promises he made before the credit-crunch came along. But, equally, if his policies were not suitable for a long-expected (at least by Vince Cable) and much predicted (again, by Lib-Dem Vince Cable) economic contraction, there is a real question about how valid or useful they were to start with. If David Cameron’s policy is no more than saying what is popular at the time he says it, then a Cameron Britain would lurch from one opportunistic position to another. Cameron leading Britain during a recession would be bad enough. Cameron leading Britain through a boom period would be recipe for disaster: he would stoke the economy far more than Gordon Brown ever did, creating the conditions for unwise investment and unbridled risk which have brought the world to its knees. We may not survive another such crisis.

No, ultimately, Cameron’s false step is not that he has angered time-served Tory backbenchers, but that he has revealed himself as a political opportunist.

Amid all the furore over expenses, it is political opportunism which we, as a nation, can least afford.

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52% of people were prepared to vote for a candidate not caught up in the scandal, even if that meant voting against the party they want to win the election.

It’s not hard to see how we got to where we are. But the question is: how do we get away?

Given that only 1 in 4 people have said they trusted MPs in general to tell the truth, and this figure has stayed fairly constant since pollsters began asking the question, we could perhaps say that it is inevitable that voters don’t trust politicians. But this is clearly not universal. 51% of Americans think Obama’s leadership is excellent or good, and 47% think his ethics are excellent or good.

Are the British naturally more cynical than Americans? Most of the world — we are given to understand — still believes British democracy to be above par on its ethics and honesty. Or do they simply believe this because they just don’t pay as much attention to it as we do?

Certainly, right now, everyone who wants to distrust politicians (that is, 3/4 of us) can find lots of evidence for it. But, as Mori points out, even before the scandal, approximately the same number of people still distrusted politicians. It is therefore clear that it is something other than our observation of what politicians do that sows our distrust.

It was said of King John that nobody trusts a man who trusts nobody.

This struck me deeply when I heard it on Melvyn Bragg’s In Our Time during the run up to the Euro elections. No-one trusts a man who himself trusts no-one. The more I consider it, the more I am compelled to believe that it is the culture of sowing distrust, innuendo, constant attacks on the character of opponents, and, worse, constant mocking, that makes all politicians (including those who don’t indulge in this, because all are tarred by association) appear to be untrusting, and therefore untrustworthy.

And yet, and yet. If we were to say that politicians were not allowed to be in conflict with each other, and to point out each other’s failings, then we would have no debate, and no means of holding government to account. The duty of opposition is to oppose, and it is one of the things which holds us back from tyranny.

So, are we therefore left with a choice: either our politicians by their behaviour will forever command our distrust, or, by their silence, will appear to earn our trust while, in truth, betraying it? This is a truly Shakespearian conundrum.

The answer, surely, is that there is a middle way. We are now engaged in a national process of hand wringing about standards in public life in relation to expenses. But it would not be beyond our power as a nation to start imposing standards on the the discourse of MPs. It was two elections ago that the Advertising Standards Authority threw its hands up and ceased to police political advertising. You can now, in a very real sense, say anything you want on a political poster, and get away with it. But the imposition of a standard of debate both in and outside the chamber of the House of Commons is something which could be done, and, for that reason, should and must be done.

At the moment, the only thing which limits a politician’s ability to make any accusation they want is the risk of being found out later on.

We are expecting the new Speaker of the House of Commons to reform members’ expenses. But we should also expect and require the Speaker to reform the standard of debate.

We, the electorate, should also seek to vote, in the new parliament, for new MPs who will not stop at nothing to obtain and maintain power. In this, in the past, we have signally failed, and we should therefore, collectively, accept a large part of the responsibility for the politicians we have elected. Because, ultimately, the electorate does not necessarily get the government it wants, but it always, collectively, gets the government it deserves.

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