A costly day of shame for Gordon Brown - and a party out of touch

From costly home renovations to a forgetful approach to a council tax claim, the collective impression that will linger in voters' minds is the assiduous lengths to which those in power were prepared to go to make the most of a generous allowance scheme.

Effectively, their lives were subsidised at the taxpayer's expense, with a thin veneer of accountability. Bad enough in any circumstances; in a recession, with millions suffering hardship, it feels rotten.

Minister after minister uses the same stiff defence: that they were only acting in accordance with the rules - which are now exposed for the lax sham they are. But even within those rules there is huge variety of interpretation.

It will be difficult to explain away why some senior figures chose to make the most of the system, while a (very) few ascetic souls made much more basic claims.

What will strike voters most is the distance of MPs from the lives of others. As with all great revelations, the detail is what sticks in the mind: Jack Straw over-claiming council tax and declaring, "Accountancy was never my strong suit", a line we must all remember when in difficulty with pesky officialdom.

Culture secretary Andy Burnham chivvying the fees office to get a move on after his complicated claim, "otherwise I might be in line for divorce". Bless.

Even straight-talking Hazel Blears could not on this occasion make up her mind which property to claim for - and entered three different ones to the fees office in a year.

On it goes from pergolas to plant pots (both the Foreign Secretary David Milliband and the Housing Minister Margaret Beckett have high-maintenance tastes when it comes to topiary).

Gordon Brown, who came to power promising a clean start after New Labour's brushes with sleaze in the cash-for-honours affair, now ends up defending his own curious arrangements, by which he paid his brother Andrew more than £3,000 a year to secure cleaning services, rather than directly employing a cleaner himself.

"I know this looks bad," was the best defence that the deputy leader Harriet Harman could muster this morning.

This example - minor in financial scale - is significant in highlighting the flawed and complex nature of the parliamentary expenses system. Here is a vestige of a world in which MPs were effectively able to top up their salaries with little scrutiny.

Even a figure such as the Chancellor, whom we might expect to have a certain touch with numeracy, could not decide which residence was his main home and kept switching the designation to boost his claim.

MPs say they observe the letter of the rules: but it is the spirit of the guidelines that is also flouted repeatedly, by MPs renovating properties at the taxpayer's expense, only to sell them and move onto another (subsidised) dwelling.

Politically, the timing of such a major leak is likely to ensure it impacts heavily on the June European and local elections.

These are already likely to be punitive for an unpopular third-term government. Now they look like a serious trip-wire for Mr Brown, as he tries to stave off a summer of discontent - and a possible leadership challenge.

Very few household names come well out of this saga: but note that one of them is the self-effacing Health Secretary Alan Johnson, who appears to have claimed a minimum in expenses.

He, together with Ed Miliband, the Energy Secretary, and Hilary Benn at Environment, qualify as one of the few "budget" ministers, who did not play the rules for advantage.

Mr Johnson is already enjoying a revival of interest as a popular choice to succeed Mr Brown: and emerging well from this saga will put him in pole position if the turmoil engulfing Labour prove fatally damaging to the PM.

Of course, we have seen only one side of the balance sheet today. It is unlikely that senior Tories were all models of Roundhead thrift when it comes to their expenses: their day of embarrassment will soon come.

Mr Cameron can hardly call for a cull of Labour ministers, knowing that his own tribe's moment of reckoning is at hand. The single factor which will preserve ministers from a cull is that so many of them - and their shadows - are in the same boat.

Revelations such as this always impact more heavily on Government than opposition however: partly because there are so many more recognisable names involved, and because those in power harvest more resentment for shortcomings than others.

There is a telling footnote here, too, in the complaint by Peter Watt, the former Labour Party General Secretary who found himself under investigation after a dubious donor was allowed to give money to Labour under an alias. Watt now says he was "abandoned by the leadership" of his party.

Moral authority is hard to gain and easy to squander in politics: the spectacle of greedy MPs maxing out on expense claims and treating the (barely rigorous) fees office as a kind of inconvenience, contrasts with the cold, arm's-length treatment meted out by Mr Brown to a party official who ended up bearing the brunt of a donor scandal - unfairly, as no charges have been brought after a long investigation.

Mr Brown will be hard pushed to boast of his "moral compass" after this. It is not as if there was not adequate warning of a shift in public mood over expenses.

Number 10 has appeared unprepared for the ferocity of response to this story from the start: a leader with better antennae for the public mood would have taken the initiative much earlier.

"We were never this bad," is John Major's verdict on Labour's general performance today. This is one of those utterances which invites the Mandy Rice Davis reply: "He would say that, wouldn't he?" but he puts his finger on a comparison which lurks in many voters' minds: the end of the Conservative era in office and Labour's decline today.

For Ms Harman to drag up the name of a Tory scoundrel, Derek Conway, to water down criticism against her party sounds as cynical as it is.

"It can't go on like this," is the glum diagnosis of one moderate former member of the Labour Cabinet. It has gone on, from bad to worse, and today's revelations will make it far harder for Mr Brown to begin the electoral turnaround he so desperately needs if he is not to slalom to a serious defeat next year.

A mixture of Arthur Daley practices, blind eyes turned and a political class out of touch have brought the Government into a new disrepute. That memory will linger, come the day of electoral reckoning.