The Real Significance of the Telegraph Story

So tomorrow’s Telegraph has the full gruesome details of parliamentary expenses. This is terribly embarrassing for the Cabinet and would have been no more than that in different times. But the problem is that the government has now become synonymous in the public imagination (or at least the media’s imagination) with the wider collapse of political morality. In the case of most members of the Cabinet this is certainly not the case – and the release of these details certainly doesn’t prove it.

But it doesn’t matter in the wider scheme of things because the country has turned against this government. Nothing they can do is right even when it is. The smallest misdemeanour is judged a serious crime. That’s just how it is when the political tide has turned. We can now look forward to a year of kicking a man when he’s down.

But Gordon Brown just goes on and on and it’s interesting that the Spectator is portraying