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.