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.