I may write more about the MPs’ expenses scandal over the coming days. It’s a fascinating piece of car-crash current affairs, watching those who lectured us that “if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear” suddenly turn out to have had something to hide themselves. It’s been a bad week for MPs, but hopefully, in the long run, a good week for politics, as the institution of Parliament, set in its arcane, superior ways, is brought down to earth with a thud.

The Telegraph’s circulation has risen – the main objective for the newspaper, of course – but it hasn’t helped its journalistic reputation by putting what appear to be genuine scoops like the Elliot Morley and Shahid Malik affairs alongside innuendo and prurient invasion of privacy. There are two issues muddled together: those cases where MPs were dishonest, and those cases were MPs took advantage of a flawed system (albeit one which they, en masse, had the power to clean up).

Labour blogger Kerron Cross pleads for us to remember that MPs are human too, as fallible as the rest of us when it comes to making expenses claims. As I’ve said in a comment submitted to his post, I sympathise with that, and some of the claims highlighted by the Telegraph are simply errors – both clerical errors and errors of judgement.

Kerron stands up for Morley, who is accused of pocketing mortgage-related expenses for over a year after his mortgage was paid off:

Take Elliot Morley, one of the most villified individuals this week. One of things most people will tell you is that Elliot is one of the nicest (and most boring) MPs in Parliament. For whatever he is being accused of now, I can’t think of a man less likely to be implicated in a major scandal.

I’m a forgiving sort and am prepared to believe, if this is the outcome of the various inquiries, that Morley really did make a clerical error. The trouble, though, is that the Government of which he was part loves its macho posturing. Say Morley had continued to claim job seeker’s allowance for 18 months after getting a job. Do we think this Government would be satisfied with “Sorry, it was a mistake and I’ve paid the money back”?

A non-musial interlude now with this brief foray into politics.

I read the news today, oh boy, and it said

Cameron would cut MP numbers

which was like déjà vu all over again. Haven’t the Tories talked about this before?

Ah, yes. Here’s Michael Howard’s pledge from 2004:

The Conservative Party would cut the number of MPs by about one-fifth if they were elected, Tory leader Michael Howard has said.
[...]
The precise number of MPs to go would depend on the result of the Welsh referendum [to scrap the Assembly], but it would probably mean a reduction of around 120 from the current total of 659.

And here’s Cameron’s “new” proposal:

David Cameron would remove more than 60 MPs as part of a Tory plan to make parliament work more efficiently.

Drawing on plans drawn up by Kenneth Clarke, the former chancellor, the Tory leader today pledges to introduce legislation in his first term as prime minister to cut the size of the Commons by 10%. There are currently 646 MPs, a figure that is due to increase to 650 at the next election.

So Cameron – via Kenneth Clarke’s constitutional review – has managed to come up with basically the same policy as before, except significantly less ambitious.

And while we’re playing House of Commons size reduction top trumps, let’s check what Nick Clegg’s position is:

Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg is calling for the number of MPs in the House of Commons to be cut by 150.

That’ll be two-and-a-half times more MPs gone than the Tories are offering.

Following up my Twitterati post, you can now check to see if your MP is one of the (very small number of) MPs on Twitter with Tweetminster.

It’s inspired, I believe, by the US version, Tweet Congress and its Liberal Democrat page carries the party’s official Twitter feed, as well as the most recent posts from our twittering MPs.

Steve Webb, the Lib Dem MP for Northavon, has a track record of being down with new-fangled interweb technologies, which led to him winning the Hansard Society’s E-Democracy Award a couple of years ago. It should be little surprise then that he has become the latest of the party’s MPs to take up blogging, with his puntastic new site The Webb log. Welcome to the blogosphere.

Perhaps as a result of various New Year’s resolution, Steve takes the total number of active blog on Lib Dem Blogs to 111;, if we were mentioning cricket, which we’re not, it would be time for a superstitious hop of some sort.

David Cameron, who is apparently the new leader of the Tories, says that Members of Parliament should not set their own salaries. Superficially, it sounds like a good idea, but I wonder if it’s anything more than a soundbite.

As I understand it, changes to MPs’ salaries are based on recommendations from the Senior Salaries Review Body, put formally passed by the Commons. Some MPs vote against their own pay raises, of course, knowing that their constituents will approve of such a stance.

Now, does anyone know the last time MPs passed a motion that differed from the SSRB recommendation? Does it happen? And when it does, do they tend to raise pay and allowances by more or less than the SSRB suggested? My suspicion is that the SSRB recommendation is always adopted, but that on occasions when it isn’t a lower level is chosen instead. If the former is the case, then Cameron’s proposal would make no difference; if the latter, it would actually result in MPs’ pay rising faster.