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If MPs believed that the removal of the first Speaker in 300 years would end their woes then the latest round of revelations about their expenses has sorely disabused them. Michael Martin was the Bourbon King of the ancien régime. His downfall, honourable members fear, has only ushered in the Reign of Terror. But, as in any revolution, who stands to gain?

The tumbrils sound nightly for the first editions of The Daily Telegraph’s guillotine. Esther Rantzen appears before the cameras like Madame Defarge, the bloodthirsty knitter from Charles Dickens’s novel set in the French revolution, A Tale of Two Cities. “Off with her head,” she cries at Margaret Moran, the Labour MP for Luton South, who made us peasants pay to treat dry rot in her Southampton...