It is very hard to become an MP unless you are a terribly nice person. You need to persuade a set of terribly nice, self-sacrificing, public-spirited party officials to grant you a place on a candidates' list. Then you need to get some very upright, hard-working people in a local constituency to select you to be their candidate. Then you need to inspire some people who, if they weren't spending their time knocking on doors or delivering leaflets for you would be out on the board of the local museum, or being governors of a school, or arranging flowers for the church, or raising money for Oxfam. There is an extended filtering process, and although it may perhaps be criticised as resulting in an overly high proportion of rather bland people, there is little real doubt that MPs are terribly nice.
Now in recent years there has been an all-but-continuous stream of attacks upon MPs. They are alleged to be corrupt, taking bribes, fiddling their expenses, allowing conflicts of interest, defrauding the taxpayer. Think of how many MPs names have come into the fray, and how senior the people alleged to be involved - including the former Prime Minister, the current Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, the leader of Scottish Labour, the Shadow Chancellor, the Conservative Party Chairman, and many others.
Now step back from all this for a moment, and ask yourself this question - Which is more plausible: that British MPs, despite being selected through many-layered processes and subjected to journalist scrutiny at a level none of the rest of us would welcome, are in fact involved in a grand-scale exercise in impropriety, that when one becomes an MP the first thing one does - regardless of how upright and noble one's life was before becoming an MP - is to "shove one's nose in the trough"? Or is it more plausible that, in fact, MPs are no more corrupt than most people of similar wealth and upbringing (and perhaps less) but are the victims of a system of petty rules, smears and innuendo that would make any group of people look bad?
I think it is completely obvious which of these must be right. MPs are not collectively wicked. Now doubtless there is scope for reform of the system - as there would be in any organisation. But the key aspiration must be to reduce the number and complexity and demands of the rules, so that MPs can get on with the business of scrutinizing the running of the country, instead of wasting their time on petty bureaucracy and fielding ridiculous slanted (and offensive) questions about their integrity.
We should start by setting an example. We can't expect other parties to be restrained in exploiting the obvious short-term advantages of smears against us when we are in power if we have not thoroughly eschewed the use of such tactics ourselves. This will stick in the craw, because it is precisely because of the lies and smears of New Labour in the 1990s that politics is where it is, and some of the most high-profile Labour "victims" (e.g. Peter Hain) were amongst the most sanctimonious critics of minor misdemeanors of our backbenchers in the past. Nonetheless, it must be done.
There have been genuine instances of impropriety in recent years. It was outrageous that Peter Mandelson was in charge of an inquiry into the business affairs of Geoffrey Robinson at the same time as owing him many hundreds of thousands of pounds (undeclared). It was shameful that David Blunkett abused his position to try to speed through his own nanny's visa application. But we cover the disgrace of such behaviour by mixing it will the pettiness of expenses and donations issues.
There are possible reforms, about which I shall write another time, but first we must accept the principle that it is the MPs, by and large, that have been wronged by most of the "scandals" of recent years, not the rest of us.