Does Britain want a parliament peopled by the rich, the retired, the young and the childless – perhaps with a few party hacks thrown in? That is the way it is heading by stripping MPs of their allowances.

The historian Thomas Babbington Macaulay observed that there was no spectacle so absurd as that of the British gripped by one of their periodic fits of morality. The uproar about MPs’ expenses threatens more serious damage than holding up the nation to ridicule. It promises to rob politics of the people it needs.