The contrast between Labour's socialist MP for Luton North, Kelvin ­Hopkins, who commutes to work and claimed £36.45 of his annual £4,800 food allowance, and the neighbouring New Labour MP, Margaret Moran, who "flipped" her second home allowance between Luton, Southampton and ­London and is now repaying a £22,500 under duress, could not be clearer.

It's hard, however, not to agree with the actor Stephen Fry, that the blizzard of petty corruption revelations, orchestrated by a newspaper whose owners live in tax exile in the Channel Islands, has got out of hand. We shouldn't confuse wisteria claims, he suggested, with "what politicians get really wrong, things like wars, things where people die". Compared with the revolving door deals, which have propelled 28 former New Labour ministers into lucrative corporate jobs on the back of their Whitehall connections, and who then help bid for government contracts, MPs' expense fiddles are small beer indeed.

<...>

Westminster is ­finally being held to account. But the greatest danger of this week's parliamentary disgrace is the boost it will give to anti-politics: the roar of rage that they're all the same, the cynicism that nothing can ever ­really change, the conviction that an outsider on a white charger can clean the Augean stables. It is a mood that has almost ­always benefited the populist right and which in Italy elevated the ­authoritarian monopolist Silvio ­Berlusconi to power in the early 1990s on the back of a "clean hands" anti-­corruption campaign.