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One veteran Labour strategist tells me that when he asked focus groups about the parliamentary expenses scandal, the assembled voters repeatedly asked one question with one voice: "Will they be going to jail?"

The Great Stink has had many corrosive effects on the reputation of the political class. It has not just been the individual outrages "“ the champagne flutes and the chandeliers, the phantom mortgages and the flipping, the duck houses and the massage chairs "“ that has done the damage. It has also been the overall impression that Planet Westminster is an unheavenly body which does not reside in the same ethical or legal solar system as the country it governs. The rapacity of so many MPs and their inability to see what they had done wrong was evidence that there seemed...