A process of reverse wealth redistribution began. Taxpayers who had borrowed and saved prudently and never expected a salary of £100,000 let alone £1,000,000 discovered that they must pay for the price for the political and financial failures of others. As they digested the news, they learned that their children would have to pay too if predictions that spending cuts and tax rises will continue into the 2020s as the cost of the banks' bailout was passed down the generations. They would all suffer from the inevitable public spending cuts. The only way they might escape the inevitable tax rises would be to lose their jobs, as hundreds of thousands have done and hundreds of thousands more will. Insiders — economists, finance ministers, the better sort of journalists — who went overnight from saying that market disciplines would ensure that taxpayers would never need to bail out the banks to insisting that taxpayers had to do just that were right when they said we had no choice. But they breezily underestimated the political effects of a crisis brought about de haut en bas, inflicted by the extraordinarily well remunerated on those on modest incomes.

On their own, the failure of Britain's most dynamic industry and the demand that the public subsidise the folly of the super-rich would be enough to provoke popular disgust. When the electorate then discovered that the politicians who were responsible for regulating the economy had devoted a fair proportion of their time to engaging in fraud, a crisis of political legitimacy was inevitable. Very few people understood the dangers inherent in credit default swaps — do not be embarrassed if you are one of them, incidentally, bankers and finance ministers could not get their heads around the technicalities either. But everyone can recognise a fiddle.

I can see why some find the indignation about the tax dodging and home refurbishing at public expense wholly disproportionate. MPs have not been selling their votes, nor have ministers been bribed to change the law. "We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality," said Macaulay, and many intelligent people feel they are living through a hysterical spasm. It is the clash of classes and the rise of great ideas and movements that should provoke constitutional crises, not small-time freeloaders claiming for Chinese needlepoint rugs and floating duck islands. An uncomprehending member of the Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee told me that job losses would soon be running at 100,000 a month while national debt was heading to wartime levels. Even if the middle-aged were in secure jobs and enjoying low interest rates, they would see their children leave school and university this summer with next to no hope of finding work. Yet, he said with a shake of his head, the public was angrier about MPs chiselling a few thousand pounds than the billions Britain has been pouring into the banks. 

Writers, on The Times in particular, have developed a case against the eruption of indignation that deserves to be taken seriously. Daniel Finkelstein echoed the private fears of many in power when he wrote: "When I witness this national mood of anger and blame, when I see people heckle politicians, and call them crooks, and lump them all together, and pass by all the good they do, I hope you will forgive me if I can't join in. I don't like it when people start mobbing up. It frightens me."

In one sense, he is right to be disconcerted. The internet age is bringing with it a level of disclosure previous rulers would have found unimaginable and intolerable. Thirty years ago, it would have been physically impossible for a newspaper to receive all the expense claims of all the MPs. A leaker would have needed a removal van to get them out of Westminster and been stopped by security before he began. Now he can copy on to a disk what was once stored on countless scraps of paper in dozens of filing cabinets, slip it into his pocket when no one is watching and stroll out the office. Traditional barriers between public and private debates are also crumbling. Andrew MacKay, a confidant of David Cameron, had to go when the Telegraph revealed that he and his wife and fellow MP, Julie Kirkbride, were engaged in a neat game. He used his second home allowance to claim more than £1,000 a month for their flat near Westminster. She used her allowance to claim £900 for the mortgage on their family home near her constituency. They could tell a compliant Commons that they were a family with no main residence, but two second homes.