Tonight:
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What a very expensive day for Labour: the newspaper leak, well ahead of the formal summer publication, of key ministers' claims for refunds on their living costs, is another blow to the dented authority of the Government.
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.
Reader views (19)
Brown's time is up.His reputation for fiscal prudence is destroyed as our children will find out.His "son of the manse" honesty and integrity also appears on a downward spiral after the recent allegations.The country hates him and everything both he and Blair have done which appear diametrically opposed to what they originally promised.He dare not call an election and will not even admit that he was wrong on "boom & bust".Why is he still in No. 10? he knows the election is lost - the only answer I can see is that he is clinging on to the very end in order to feather his own nest.Whatever the reason we are certainly not being led by a prime minister he lost that title when he backed out of an election he would have won.
Meanwile the SS GT Britain is adrift in a perfect storm while the Captain lies in his bunk sleeping off a heavy session of nokia throwing with the crew.
- Phil, Ipswich
All those receipts?...It's all very shaming...But...We'll still vote Labour because the ethos and the foundation of 'a people's party' is always undiminished!
- Bob Clark, SE London
Anyway Sally looks to be enjoying her jaunty, newfound, self promoting, taxpayer funded, celebrity lifestyle.
Wonderful.
And rid of dear sweet nanny and the kids again too!
Marvellous.
- Dave, Cumbria
And these are the same people who lambast those who are least fortunate as "benefit scroungers"
- Jh, London
If people think the MP's expenses are a scam, wait until the list of Euroministers expenses is let out of the bag. If it ever is?
- Albert Hall, hove england
With a general election denied for 11 months,would the full power of the UK electorate please turn out in droves on Euro election day and give this government the biggest couple of black eyes any ruling party in living history has ever had?
Enough is enough and they know they deserve it.
- William Grierson, Kimpton-UK
In my last income tax return I forgot to include an small annunity of £250.00.
The tax authorities have threatened to levy a heavy fine for this failure and to trawl back through my tax returns for the past six years. Do I have the Jack straw defence i.e. "I am not very good at accounts"
£250.00 would hardly keep Precott in lavatory seats for a year.
- Charles, Stanmore. London
I just cannot reconcile why the Taxpayer has to pick up the bill for feeding MP's when they are in attendance at the London addresses, Some claims have amounted to £400 per month - so does this allowance cater for all the MP's family and associates, or partner(s). Why should their victuals be free?? They have been living the life of Riley.
- Robert El-Cid., Hull, East Yorks.,
What really gets my goat is that this preachy Government is so full of pious self-righteousness and is forever waxing lyrical about how to stop tax evasion and ensure we all pay our full whack. There they are sucking the taxpayer dry for every penny they can think of and when they are found out have to rely on that age-old excuse of the spiv and fly boy - "I was only following the rules" (or their generous interpretation of them). Not a thought appears to have crossed their minds as to fairness to the taxpayer or making moderate claims at public expense - both of which are implicit in the very rules they quote. They are a shameful bunch who should quit office now. Frankly I never thought much of Gordon Brown's supposed moral compass. It always seemed to me not to stretch further than self-convenience would permit. No doubt Opposition MPs will be seen also to have been behacing badly, but those in Government have a particular responsibility to behave morally and use taxpayers' money sparingly.
- James Elliott, Eastbourne UK
If there's one lesson this shoddy Government could learn from the Tory experience of the 1990s is that the longer you desperately cling on to power with such sleazy allegations against you then the heavier will be your electoral defeat when it comes. Major clung on until the last legal day in 1997- and the Tories were drubbed beyond what even they were probably expecting. People were bursting to get rid of them, and the longer they lingered the stronger people's resentments became. The best thing Brown could do is call an election by the Autumn, knowing the Government will lose- but at least people might see them as retaining some shred of decency and respect them for it. At the rate they're going they'll be lucky even to win in the slums, so bad will their defeat be.
- Richard, London
I bet tacky Jacqui's husband regrets claiming for his pornographic films on Jacqui's expenses as it was that claim which outraged tax payers and made us demand that a full list of their expenses be published. I don't suppose he dare show his face in Redditch.
- R.F., Yorks, UK
Do we, the electorate, have no power whatsoever in this "so called" democracy? It seems so. Why can't we ask for an early General election to rid us of these fat cats? Why can't we demand instant changes to the expenses "rules", force repayment, charge frauds and request immediate appointment of independent auditors(truly independent, please, not just the "mates" of the exploiters)? Why can't we just freeze Sir Fred's and other RBS director's pensions? Do I have to continue? Don't talk to me about police states around the World or regimes in say, Zimbabwe. We have a "legal" version of the same systems.
- Paul, Feltham
It is time for newspapers, journalists and all political commentators to start pressing Brown and his cabal to resign for the good of the country.
This article, though well written, merely relays facts that we already know. What the electorate really wants to know is when will we get a chance to vote in a new government?
- Nobby Clark, Perth, Scotland
Of course there will be equally dishonest claims from the Tories, but what makes these unsavoury revelations so much worse is that Labour is the party of equality.
Clearly in this government some are more equal than others.
That is, they believe themselves to be apart from, or above, the accepted norms of moral behaviour, whilst constantly lecturing the country on how we should behave.
They now reveal themselves as a bunch of carpet-bagging opportunists who are in it for the money, and not for any altruistic motives.
What a bunch of hypocrites
- Ronnie, Billericay UK
Add MP's expenses to the Gurkha scandal, to the deporable state of the NHS, to the crumbling skools that churn out kids who cannot read or write or add or subtract, to the state of the UK prisons, bursting at the seams with petty offenders.....
WHILST THE REAL CRIMINALS ARE ALLOWED TO FLOAT AROUND ON CLOUD NINE AND WHO DO NOT GIVE A HOOT IF JOE PUBLIC DROPS DEAD FROM FROSTBITE OR MALNUTRITION.
- Reuben Camara, Morecambe UK
The court of public opinion has sentenced the ghastly, authoritarian, incompetent and spineless sham of a party aka Nu-Labour to political death row.
I look forward to the painful demise of Gormless Clown, Miss Jackboot "PIGGY" Smiff,Harridan Harperson, David Millipede,Hazel Bliars,Two-Jags Prezza and the rest of this embarrassing cabal of pathetic figures.
We need to restor common sense ideas and more importantly - Democracy! (Something which ZaNuLabour have obliterated in the UK)\
RESIGN NOW GORDON BROWN - THE WHOLE COUNTRY DEMANDS AN ELECTION!
- Dan H, Fontvieille,Monaco
I wake up in the morning and go to work like most people and before the day is done I have been taxed in every way imaginable. This will only end when I die and then the government will take a huge percentage of anything I leave to my family. Then I hear that MPs are using this money taken from me and my family to buy things for them and their family. If they think they have a right to this money they had better make a very good argument for it.
- Alex C, London
This Government is finished. The longer they cling on to power, the longer we all have to suffer.
- St, London
On top of all that, you would think it would be an easy task for Brown to avoid the insanely bad publicity relating to the Ghurkas. But - oh no - he can't even get that right. Brown and New Labour are truly finished.
- Jethro Penzance, Streatham Common
