Well, that was a miserable week. Like the creature from the black lagoon, the tentacles of the lax financial regime in the last Parliament reached out of the mire and strangled talk about everything else, including the tax cuts that benefit almost all of us, the great help for businesses now available and another upgrade of Britain’s growth forecasts by the IMF. At the centre was Maria Miller –a very decent, hard working, capable colleague, who was investigated properly, found to be innocent of all allegations of wrong-doing, identified herself an over-payment in her favour and corrected that.

So, what went wrong? Putting aside the rights and wrongs of the wording of apologies and the truly horrific media mob that developed, the real issue was that Maria made claims for an MP’s expenses in good faith against an impenetrable, flawed and incomprehensible set of guidelines that had grown up over the years without any public scrutiny.

Do you remember that never-ending list of jaw-dropping revelations when the media blew the lid off the system? Claiming the cost of a mortgage on a property and then banking a capital gain when you sold it? Furnishing a London flat or country home from the “John Lewis” list and keeping all the furniture when you stepped down? Being able to change designation of your primary house at will, apparently depending on the maintenance and decorating required? Damp proofing your partners’ house – hundreds of miles from your constituency? Chauffer-driven trips to the supermarket? Moats, duck houses and horse manure?

Yes, fellow tax payer, we paid for it all. And they were all, in most cases, legal and legitimate claims under that system, although a few bad apples, as in every walk of life, fiddled and diddled the rules and ended up in jail.

But this Parliament was supposed to be different and new MPs like me came in determined to make changes to the system that had rocked public trust. The new expense reimbursement scheme is far more sensible (albeit with some antiquated oddities that I would not dream of claiming against) and all claims are online and transparent (see my website www.clairefordevizes.org). However, the mood is again that we are acting like a barn full of Tamworths with our snouts in the slop bucket and we have, again, to raise our game, sort out the system and focus on the core mission of politics – to represent, to the best of our ability, the people who elected us.