She receives a good salary as Home Secretary and also has a part-time job as Member of Parliament for Redditch. So she is not short of a bob or two. But she works for a very odd employer (the nation) which allows her and her colleagues to set their own income levels.

A couple of decades ago, before Jacqui entered the House of Commons, they had a bit of a problem. They felt the part-time job of Member of Parliament deserved the same sort of salary as a very successful, full-time lawyer or surgeon, but on the other hand, they knew their employers (us) would object to that. So they devised a bit of a trick.

They set their salaries at a lower level than they wanted, now £63,000, and set up an expenses system which would allow them to draw what they thought was a proper amount – now running at an average of about £200,000 a year. They even set up an elaborate system of rules and regulations to govern their expenses and a large bureaucracy, the Fees Office of the House of Commons, to make sure people only took their fair share.

Every Member of Parliament knew what was going on. Just about all of them took advantage of it. They just kept us in the dark so we would not get upset.

Jacqui Smith had nothing to do with setting the system up. It was just what she found when she first got elected. All she has done is to obey the rules and do what more or less every Member of Parliament is doing. That is why she has claimed her main residence is her sister's back bedroom – and has claimed £24,000 a year for it – and that is why her husband draws £40,000 a year as her "secretary". She is just obeying the rules and taking exactly as much of our money as she and the rest of her colleagues think she deserves. She did not make the system. She just obeys its rules.

Now, all of a sudden, we have realised it is not a terribly good system and attracts the wrong sort of people to the job. The truth of the matter is that, out of more than 600 of them, there is not a single one – in any political party – who has campaigned to bring this rotten system to an end. Not one!

There are two lessons to be learned from all of this. One is that there are quite a lot of people who, given the chance, can see nothing wrong in ripping us all off. And the second is that, whether we vote Conservative or Liberal Democrat or Labour, they are the only kind of people we have been prepared to vote for, up to now.

When will we see sense?

email:thecontrarian@hotmail.co.uk