Cameron is no better and thoroughly deserved the front-page spanking of the Mail on Sunday, the parish paper for true-blue Tories. The paper's fine political team revealed that Dave, one of the richest MPs in the House, had trousered the maximum in allowances to buy his Oxfordshire pad. He even put in a claim for pruning the wisteria. Some of us clubbed together to buy him a pair of secateurs, though we would like to cut off some more vital parts of our beloved leaders.
All of them have been in a bidding war to try and sound more sanctimonious than each other. The prize for puke-making opportunism surely goes to the LibDem leader, Nick Clegg. He wins the tea room's Uriah Heep award. When he was a Member of the European Parliament, he helped himself to taxpayers' dosh on a scale far greater than anything MPs have claimed. Now he postures as holier-than-thou, declaring that MPs should sit through August and September to listen to his preaching and no MP should earn anything outside Parliament, which has turned white the faces of Charlie Kennedy, Ming Campbell and Chris Huhne, all of whom have nice little earners to supplement the £800 a week of an MP's salary (after tax).
One minister keeping his head very low in the scandal is Jack Straw. He is now the Norman Fowler of the Labour government, the eternal survivor of any reshuffle or change of leader. Jack-the-lad was responsible for the FOI law being extended to MPs while the BBC, the Royals, academy schools and almost anyone who asked for an exemption managed to be excluded. Actually, no one quite knows why anyone wants to be a Labour minister. At the reshuffle, most of Labour's competent backbenchers kept their mobiles turned off as no one is that keen to crew Brown's Titanic. Shrewdies such as John Hutton, Patricia Hewitt and Geoff Hoon jumped off to look for private-sector lifeboats while being an ex-minister still has some selling power.
The farce of Labour's ladies has cheered us all up. Poor Hazel Blears's confession that she had made a terrible mistake in criticising the Leader was a modern version of Shostakovich's A Soviet Artist Replies to Just Criticism and a warning of the awesome reach of Brown (Nick, the Chief Whip, not Gordon), whose treatment of those disloyal to the Dear Leader is exemplary. Those who dared to speak against Brown have their cards marked. But the pressure will mount. It was crazy to think a PM would be forced out on the back of lousy election results. Are there autumn months with Ides in them? Beware Gordon, beware!
Meanwhile, the election of a new Speaker beckons. My desk is heaped with over-wordy letters from wannabes. Field is too eccentric; Bercow too young; Young too old; Beith too boring; Widdicombe too squeaky; Ming too LibDem. Oh dear. There is no one to vote for. By the time Standpoint is on sale we have to have a new Speaker. But only for nine months. The next Commons will have 300 new MPs. And the show will go on.
