Last time around I strongly tipped Alan Johnson as the next Labour leader. For all the wrong reasons: his 'backstory', his links with the unions, his Londonness, the constituency in Hull (?) and his relaxed, aged Mod manner. None of this should count, while his honestly expressed view that he was not of the right calibre to be PM should matter a lot. Anyway, now Polly Toynbee has backed Johnson after Brown's moral compass seems to have gone haywire. So I must have been really, really wrong as they say in Luton.

Meanwhile, dressed in his splendid dinner jacket, the 'CO-median' (think the RSM in the film Zulu as you pronounce that word) Stephen Fry says its 'so bourgeois' for the public to be concerned about larceny and fraud in our House of Commons. Mr Fry obviously labours under the delusion that he is some sort of anarchist radical, never having grown up since having been a little star at Cambridge. Many Cambridge graduates suffer from this affliction.

I think David Cameron is handling this very well, despite the best efforts of little Michael Crick and Newsnight to really bury the Tories with this. They even wheeled out Helena Kennedy QC to add her penny worth of 'thought' on the problem in that ever so Jean Brody gushing manner. Cameron said 'sorry' first, and is spending today working out to discipline his MPs. He should go further. A while ago I read that he was thinking of reducing their number so as to conform the House of Commons with comparable legislatures. There are too many of them, and with a mere 17 bills this parliament from the deadbeat government, many of them are underoccupied. That should now become an election manifesto pledge. There should also be a clear separation of the function of the Speaker from the auditing mechanisms that dole out expenses. If HoC civil servants with degrees in classics or theology are not to the job, then sub-contract it to external auditors and accountants.

I knew quite a few politicians live here in Kennington - having seen Darling, Charles Kennedy, Ashdown and a few others in the street, as well as our neighbour Jack Straw who comes and goes in the night- but my God, I hadn't realised until this scandal that the place is infested with them. I suppose because you can walk to the Commons in 20 minutes. But at least our local MP Kate Hoey seems a decent sort, doubly so now that she has been so viscerally denounced by the Speaker, who shows no signs of being responsible for this disaster. I sense an election coming faster than I thought.