James Forsyth

Hazel Blears flipping her second home several times is one of the worst cases uncovered by the Telegraph. But her actions are really no worse than those of Geoff Hoon. Yet, it is Blears who has copped most of the flak from the media. Gordon Brown hasn’t helped her case by describing her actions as ‘totally unacceptable behaviour’ while defending Hoon. There is a view that Blears, who remember criticised the PM in a newspaper article just days before this story broke, is being set up to the be the symbolic Cabinet sacking over the whole expenses business. So it is interesting to see her close friend Caroline Flint say explicitly that Blears shouldn’t be moved in the reshuffle. After the June 4th elections, Brown’s authority will probably hit a new low.

Oh come on! Paul Waugh, whose blog is normally excellent, is fuming about the Tory MP for Clwyd West claiming for a sat-nav. He asks: “...does any self-respecting MP really need a satnav to find their way around their constituency? Isn't it an admission that they are a bit disconnected from their voters?” This is just silly. I’m sure Paul Waugh knows London very well, but I’d be shocked if he knew where every street was. More reasonably, Waugh asks whether it is reasonable to charge the cost of the sat-nav to the taxpayer. I think it is on the grounds that if any company required one of its employees to do a lot of driving to varied locations it would not be considered unreasonable for them to claim for a sat-nav.

One thing that the new Speaker must remember is that the expenses scandal has hardened—not created—the public’s contempt for Parliament. As Camilla Cavendish writes today, “one of the reasons public anger goes a lot deeper than Sir Peter Viggers's duck pond is because we feel we can no longer change our laws by voting out politicians. The EU machine marches on, constraining everything from the future of the Post Office to what vitamins we can take. The promised referendum on the Lisbon treaty has been ditched. The quango nanny state has acquired a momentum of its own. Politicians have given away powers that they held in trust for the people. They cannot be altogether surprised if people now lump them all together in impotent fury.

From Bret Stephens’ review of Edmund Morgan’s latest book: in Philadelphia in 1787, Mr. Morgan uncovers one more instance of witch hunting, this one barely remembered, concerning an old woman named Korbmacher who died soon after being brutalized by a mob. Not much else is known about the incident, but Mr. Morgan is struck that this outbreak should occur in the same place where the Founders were gathering for the Constitutional Convention, the very summit of Enlightenment thought and action. There is no record that the founders took note of poor old Korbmacher. But the event was widely noted in the Philadelphia press, and Mr. Morgan suspects an influence on the thinking of the convention, specifically its distrust of popular rule.

The expenses scandal has already created three vacancies in extremely safe Tory seats, and the word is that there could a dozen or so more before this is all over. The temptation for the Tories will be to opt for the safety first approach and fill these seats with solid but unexceptional local candidates. But that would be a mistake. Instead, the Tories should be aiming to substantially improve the talent pool from which their ministers will come from. There are already a host of people advising the Tory leadership who have more influence than the average backbencher. However, until these people become MPs there is, for obvious and proper reasons, a limit to how much they can do.