How do you fix MPs’ expenses conduct? Give them more control over it.

It’s not often I would, in the fashion of the late Tony Benn, pass lightly over the personalities in a row in favour of discussing what he liked to call the ‘ishyoos’ but in the case of Maria Miller, it might do no harm. It does rather look, as Isabel Hardman has already intimated, that she’s toast, but the answer to the Problem of Maria is, I would say, pretty well the opposite of what we’re all told. Which is, as Labour MP John Mann (he whose formal complaint about Mrs Miller prompted the original investigation) put it in an urgent question, that MPs should not regulate their own expenses conduct.

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The answer, rather, is to give them rather more control over it.