Mary Dejevsky: MPs are less corrupt than out of date

Those not on the take may be tarred, quite unjustly, with that brush

Aren't we all having an absolute ball! (All of us, that is, except for our MPs, who will spend the weekend cowering from furious constituents.) You couldn't make it up.

The Prime Minister is saddled with John "two loo-seats" Prescott, a (just ex-) justice minister with a jumboid TV, and a former minister who forgot he's paid off his mortgage. The Leader of the Opposition finds his regular-bloke efforts kiboshed overnight by his honourable members' swimming pools and moats, while MP-couples of both parties have shown how much more expensively two can live than one. Talk about justification for marriage!

This is wonderful knockabout stuff. What is more – with the regrettable exception of one (male) minister's non-claim for tampons – it's all true, as you can tell from the deafening silence where denials might have been. Thousands and thousands of taxpayers' pounds have kept MPs in the style of interior decor to which they aspire.

But, dare I say it, there is a risk here. As the nation binges on the details of politicians' excesses, we may be having so much fun that we miss what is hidden in the small print and, at the same time, the bigger picture.

Voters, it is clear, are in no mood for small print. One receipt, be it from Heals or Asda, and all their worst preconceptions about the political class are confirmed. Yet what has happened is a bit more complex. There are, for instance, MPs who have not been on the take who may now be tarred, quite unjustly, with that brush.

Nor is it reasonable to condemn non-London MPs for claiming the costs of living in two places. As a former foreign correspondent and now (unsubsidised) second-home owner, I am all too familiar with the costs and hassles of setting up a replica home. And London is not only an expensive place to live, but somewhere you may be hard put to find a reasonably priced maintenance service at short notice. Many of the costs cited for cleaning, boilers, bed linen etc may look stratosopheric from elsewhere, but in the capital they are not extortionate.

There is another small-print question, too. Nick Clegg, for the Liberal Democrats, is right to draw a line between those who played the system to enrich themselves – who could face the law, let alone de-selection – and those whose choice of home furnishings raised eyebrows. But the latter group has reason to feel aggrieved. They knew that details of their claims would be made public. But they did not know this when they made their claims. The rules were changed mid-stream.

Some MPs say that a good rule of thumb is not to claim for anything you would not like to see reported in your local paper – and good for them. But for the Commons to move, retrospectively, from a system that essentially provided lump-sum allowances (up to £400 for food; up to £24,000 for a second home etc) to a more accountable and transparent one was always likely to leave some high and dry. It would have been fairer to announce that full transparency would start from now, as happened in the Scottish Parliament, and expect the culture change to follow, as it did there. This would not preclude those who had played the system being called to account, but it would have spared them (and us) the tawdry parade of consumerism.

Yet MPs have only themselves to blame that the Commons did not lead the drive to clean up the system and still has not caught up with Scotland. Which is where the bigger picture takes over. We have been used to seeing British democracy as a paradigm for the world. If in doubt, we refer to Magna Carta, to our Houses of Parliament as the mother of them all, and to Prime Minister's Questions as an example of how an executive is held to account. But the institutions of this supposedly model democracy have been fraying for some time. Extravagant ceremonial and a gift for rhetorical jousting have blinded us to its inadequacies.

While easily in first place for entertainment value, the expenses scandal is only the latest evidence that an overhaul is more than due. In the past fortnight alone, two scandals of at least equal, if not greater, seriousness have broken, only to be eclipsed by the carry-on in the Commons.

Earlier this week, in a move without recent precedent, a House of Lords committee recommended that two (Labour) peers be suspended after allegations that they had been prepared to accept money for amending laws. The two deny misconduct, but the whole House will vote on the suspension next week. Meanwhile professional lobbying, which is legal, grows apace.

In the other scandal, six men were convicted by a court in Slough for a massive fraud involving postal votes. They had used methods similar to those that a judge in an earlier case had said would "disgrace a banana republic" and gone on to describe the Government as being "in denial".

To these quite different cases could be added a third from last year. The police raid on the parliamentary office of Damian Green was a gross breach of convention that exposed, if not contempt for the institution, then a shaming ignorance of the place of Parliament in British life.

There are those who argue that none of this would have happened before New Labour went into government, with its huge majority, its distaste for history and its "intensely relaxed" attitude to making money. A less partisan explanation would be that these institutions, in their present form, are simply not compatible with life as it is today. The speed with which information is disseminated, and the democratisation that demands inclusion, while creating a self-perpetuating elite, do not sit well with political institutions such as ours.

Reforms, including devolution, fewer hereditary peers, and expanded postal voting, have been tried, but only piecemeal and with no appreciation of the distorting knock-on effects. In the end, we may be grateful to our errant MPs. Not only have they entertained us mightily, but they have shown us that our democracy, like our banks, is no longer AAA-rated. It's time to look, with curiosity and humility, at how other countries do these things and modernise our political system, root and branch.