When will it dawn on MPs how bad they look to us?

My friend managed to wangle a few weeks' work in the House of Commons' secretive Fees Office. She was convinced a prominent and strikingly repellent MP was on the take. To her disappointment, he wasn't and she decided to look at others instead.

She began at "A" and moved down the list of MPs alphabetically. Conway's temerity leapt out at her, and she tipped off the press. She carried on scrutinising but before she could reach the end of "C" her time in the Fees Office was up.

As I listened to her, I realised that if Derek Conway had been called Eric Donway, the story of his largesse would never have broken. And what, I wondered, of all the MPs with surnames from "D" on? Are they engaged in what we can politely call Spanish practices?

Well, we know Nicholas and Ann Winterton received £165,000 in Commons expenses for their second home in Westminster even though they had paid off their mortgage. We know that Labour's Ed Balls and Yvette Cooper used neat footwork to get the public to pay £44,000 a year towards the cost of their mortgage on a second home in Stoke Newington.

We also know that when faced with a clamour for reform, Michael Martin, the dreadful Speaker, has selected some less than transparent characters to serve on the committee to examine the proper response to a growing scandal.

There is David Maclean, who led the campaign against MPs being scrutinised and Sir Stuart Bell, the Labour MP whose son Malcolm was jailed for a theft from an MP's office he committed wh i le daddy employed him as a Commons researcher.

Above all, we know that outside Westminster such behaviour isn't tolerated for a moment. If a company sends employees to work in another part of Britain or abroad, it will pay for a rented flat or hotel. It would fire them if it found they had used other people's money to buy a house and pocket the profit.

Outside Westminster, lots of people are stressed but they can't say: "My marriage is breaking up, employ my partner at once." Nor can they submit expenses without receipts or expect accusations of skimming to be examined by an incestuous audit committee.

For better and for worse, modern Britain is an open country. We value transparency and accountability above all and are filled with suspicion when they are absent. Parliament must live up to the same standards that everyone must abide by or it will become a despised irrelevance.