Ah well. David Laws resigned. Hindsight says, “inevitably.” No benefit of doubt, no sympathy and no excuses – not on expenses.

The Rules, such as they were, allowed intolerable abuses, the worst of which was the practice of flipping. Flipping was using the taxpayer to bankroll a lucrative property investment business, and many MPs made a lot of money from this. Use the taxpayer to pay the mortgage and sell it at a profit, and watch the money roll on in. The Flippers, however, got away with it. The cute sounding label, “flipping” obscured the detail of the practice from the public (a bit like “Quantitative Easing” did) – and worse obscured how they’d been exploited to enrich these MPs. So the wrath and anger of the public turned instead to much simpler abuses – duck islands, moat cleaning, giant televisions. Like Al Capone, it was only those MPs that didn’t pay the proper taxes on the profits they made that actually had anything to answer.

So Laws, having probably broken an actual rule under a system with rules that allowed much, much, much worse abuses of taxpayers, has been forced to resign while visceral, angry voices spit “criminal!” and “thief!” at him.

Meanwhile, those other MPs, the ones with the fat bank accounts from their properly speculation, who broke no rules at all, probably can’t quite believe their luck. Laws should have simply claimed the full whack for a property of his own, that he didn’t even live in, and have sold that for a profit. That, you see, would have been perfectly fine. But, damn, only claiming half of what he could have, but paying it his landlord who he was also having sex with? Clearly the man must suffer until the ends of the earth for his crimes.

Ah well, it’s over. Tomorrow I’m off to B&Q to get myself a pitch fork. I feel like I’m missing out on all the fun.

David Laws has been keeping two secrets. The first secret was revealed last week – it turns out David Laws is an incredibly impressive Minister, able to pick up his brief as Chief Secretary to the Treasury and run with it in a very short space of time. If the coalition has done anything, it’s given Laws a chance to prove his worth with real responsibility rather than sticking to the normal script for Lib Dems and languishing on the opposition benches for an entire political career.

The other secret came out yesterday. In a clumsy attempt to conceal his sexuality and protect the privacy of himself and his partner, Laws had been claiming rent on a “room” in his partner’s flat as his second home. Fair enough, he’s entitled to claim for a second home, but MPs haven’t been allowed to make payments to their spouses since 2006. That why he’s in trouble today.

I think few can imagine what it must be like trying to keep your sexuality a secret whilst living in the public gaze, especially when MPs have their living arrangements as a matter of public record but when the rules changed Laws was faced with a horrible dilemma: He could move out of his partner’s flat and live on his own OR “out” himself and his partner and claim the same money in a different way OR do nothing and carry on as before, exploiting the fuzzy definition of ‘treated as a spouse’ in the rules.

Laws, it seems, chose the last option – he wanted to continue his living arrangements and NOT out himself… and so, when the Telegraph found out David Laws was in a relationship with the man he was renting from, they unleashed both barrels.

Can Laws survive this? It’s hard to say at this point. Alistair Campbell’s rule was that if you were still in the news after 12 days, your time was up. If this had been Labour, Laws would have gone by now – such was the weakness of their opinion polling and proximity to the election that they couldn’t afford the luxury of standing up for their colleagues. What mattered to them is how things looked not how things were, and this looks very, very bad indeed.

The sad reality for Laws is that in the current climate of anger about MPs expenses he’s unlikely to be given the benefit of the doubt by the press or the public at large. That’s one of the privileges that MPs have lost, and for all the sympathy and understanding about Laws’ motives, and irrespective of his undeniable talent, and the awful tragedy that a true social and economic liberal will almost certainly never be leader of the Lib Dems, he may still end up losing this job.

I just can’t help but feel that if I had been in the same situation, faced with the same horrendous choice between following the letter of the law or protecting my own family’s privacy I wouldn’t have done the exactly the same thing.

UPDATE: While we’re Wargaming Laws’ choices, another that’s been mooted has been ‘why didn’t he just pay out of his own pocket?’ Simple answer is that MP’s living arrangements are a matter of public record. If, when the rules changed, Laws suddenly stopped claiming for the ‘room’ he was living in and inexplicably became the only non-London based MP in the country not to bother claiming a second home allowance, he’d have been outed. Gay or not, Laws was entitled to claim the costs of living in London.

Ikea. Oh, Ikea. We shared a beautiful thing once upon a time, didn’t we? You, with your minimalist Swedish design and low-fi production values and me with my lack of money… could there be a more intoxicating meeting of minds?

You made me feel so special… but I see now you made everyone else feel special too, didn’t you? And now, somehow, we all have the same tables. Everywhere I go I see my table over and over again. You sold MY table and MY chairs to anyone who waved their money at you, didn’t you?

It’s not my table these days. It’s the People’s Table. Here it is:

It’s called the Lack table, because it ‘lacks’ anything except essential table-yness. That’s how it all starts, you see. You begin to see Lack tables everywhere and you wonder… what else does ‘everyone’ have? I look up onto walls and I see People’s Art. I look in drawers and cupboards and find People’s Mugs, People’s Crockery and People’s Cutlery. The People’s Sofa Bed and People’s Armchair and that’s when it hits me. That’s when I realise what’s happened, why I don’t love you any more, Ikea.

You used to represent freedom, escape from conformity and the hideosity of Chintz and the horrors of Argos. You liberated us from the tyranny of factory outlets demanding we buy now, pay 6 months later and get the damn thing a year after that.

Yet, ten years later, you’re still selling exactly the same things you were selling back then. Nothing really changes. It’s the same People’s Tables, same People’s Art, the same People’s Sofa Bed.

So now? Now you represent conformity and the old guard.. they’re the fruity ones. If there was a Socialist revolution today, you’d be the only furniture shop still running, and you’d be called the People’s Ikea and we’d all have to queue to get our People’s Bookcase and our People’s Chopping Board and… in many ways, things really wouldn’t be that different. But that’d be it for us. There’d never be a new kind of table. Lack would be the Alpha and Omega of Coffee Tables until we couldn’t take it any more.

Thankfully, mercifully, there isn’t likely to to be a revolution today. And we do, in fact, have a choice. So I’m going to look for another lover now, Ikea. Sure, you sell the perfect, neutral, goes with anything coffee table for the ridiculous price of £7.99 and beating that’s the most mighty challenge faced by anyone in the history of retail EVER. But, brilliantly, the challenge is still on. There’s probably people beavering away in some building somewhere plotting and scheming this very thing. Someone could do it. Someone could make a better table that costs less than that.

Sorry Ikea. It’s not me. It’s you. It’s over. I want to see what else is out there. Let’s still be friends, though eh? I think the leg’s coming off one of my Lack tables and it needs replacing… and I could do with some bulbs while I’m there… and… and..

The keenly observant amongst you will have noticed that this blog hasn’t had my full attention this week. There’s been work to do, not least of which because I’ve been helping set up another blog which will be launching soon – more on this soon, I hope.

Normal service shall be resumed shortly. Missed loads of interesting stories, but my favourite – in a makes-me-so-angry-I-want-to-puke sort of way was the “There’s no money left” joke note left for David Laws. Cos, hey, that’s hilarious. Yep.

I also want to get stuck into the Labour Leadership contest to discover what non-Labourites need to know about Next Labour. I’m still convinced we’re going to see a much more aggressively anti-immigration, anti-EU, anti-Market Labour Party which will attempt to rebuild that core vote. Is David Miliband the right man for that job? I don’t think so.

In other news we got the full Programme For Government published, which needs some picking over. That probably won’t happen on this blog – I’ve never been a policy wonk and I don’t intend to start now – but did I mention there’s another blog starting up? Perhaps that’ll be of help. Who knows?

So Henry Porty at the Guardian’s Liberty Central Blog has decided to call it a day. The Government is ‘great’ on Civil Liberties so job done, right?

I wish I could be so sure. Labour’s totalitarianism was the force that created the Liberty Central blog, not to mention the rest of the pro-Liberty bloggers, pundits and writers. Labour’s power-grab caused a reaction, of which I know I’m a part. We organised and protested on the Internet and in the newspapers and at fancy speaking dinners, doing everything we could to influence the opinions of policy makers and regular voters.

And hey, in many ways it worked. Good for us. Rare common ground between the grassroots of the left, right and liberal leading to a good result. But what about the next front in the battle for liberty? It’s not enough for people to be politically and personally free. They have to be economically free, too. If you control a person’s money you control the person. The true power of our State lies here, and there’s no sign of The Coalition being willing to give that up.

Nope, the battle for real liberty has barely started. Our victory, if you can call it that, is that the very worst abuses of personal freedom by the last Government are going to be checked and rolled back. But the Digital Economy Act is staying on the statute books, we have no idea what’s going to be in the Freedom Bill… and there’s more than just a few weasel words and exceptions in what we’ve seen already that may blunt the knife The Coalition is using. We may, still, be disappointed.

Going further, the new front as far as Civil Liberties are concerned may turn out to be adapting to threats to our privacy not just from the State, but from abusive private sector organisations and web applications like Facebook. Facebook needs bringing down, I’ve no doubt about that. Not by the Government, but in the same way that MySpace and all the other old social networking sites fell – people just need somewhere better to go. The “punditariat” have a long way to go in educating and persuading that having photographs and personal details available for anyone to access on the internet is harmful, that such lack of privacy changes how people behave and removes an individual’s freedom from conformity. Facebook’s made it extremely difficult to secure your private data, and it’s alarming that people haven’t reacted more strongly to this.

Time to redouble efforts, not simply fade away regarding the job as done.