MPs' expenses are knocked into a top hat by the eye-watering news that David Cameron's star parliamentary candidate Zac Goldsmith - son of billionaire Jimmy and brother of comely Jemima Khan - has robbed the British taxpayer of £5.8million in dodged tax.
Nothing could speak louder about the nature of the would-be Tory government than this.
There are more Old Etonians and other public school types on Cameron's front bench than at any time since the 19th century. Their treasurer and chief funder Lord Ashcroft presides over their affairs from the tax exile of Belize.
As Gordon Brown voluntarily paid back the £500 for the painting of his shed, how about would-be MP and non-domicile Zac pays back the £5million in unpaid taxes? From time to time, I come across the deluded and the deceived who've fallen for the "We're closing in" rhetoric of the campaign against benefit cheats. Of course nobody should be allowed to rip off the benefits system. But why don't we start at the top, where the big money is going missing? Why don't we start with Lord Ashcroft and Zac Goldsmith? If Brown and Darling were men instead of mice they'd do just that, and quickly.
Who knows, guys, it might even help in the forthcoming election? Did anyone check that Tory defector, now a New Labour Defence Minister, Quentin Davies - surely the only rat ever to clamber aboard a sinking ship - hasn't slipped in a claim for the removal of that hump on his back? In the middle of a war in which he is the spectacularly unsuccessful procurement minister - a combination of essential equipment never ordered and a £6billion overspend on the otiose, the grandiose and the merely gross - he sat down to compose a £20,000 expense claim for, among other things, the repair of the bell tower on his stately home. A Labour MP, that is, with a stately home. And a bell tower. There is another Labour MP, also a Tory defector, Shaun Woodward. Married to a Sainsbury, he has SEVEN homes worth tens of millions and complete with butlers. He is the richest man in parliament, one of the richest in the country. But that doesn't stop him sitting down and filling in an expense claim form on which he extracts to the penny the exact maximum in second home allowance.
What's wrong with these people? Then there's Tory grandee, head of the controversial Conservative Friends of Israel, James Arbuthnot MP. He's the chairman of the Commons Defence Select Committee. In the middle of a war, he too had other things on his mind. He might have been watching the history channel. Or Newsnight, Question Time or the BBC.
Instead one night last summer he was watching the shopping channel QVC. As you do when you're a top parliamentarian. His eye was caught by a three-pack of garlic crushers and peelers. Well, every home should have one. But three? And at the public expense? Even Gordon Brown claimed £500 for the re-painting of his "summer house" - what the rest of us call a shed - in Queensferry.
Why? Tory toff Lord Snooty Cameron, who last year claimed to cut back his Wisteria, now bills us £1000 for Aga oil.
Two millennia ago, the Roman Emperor Nero famously fiddled whilst Rome burned. Our rulers fiddle while they burn our money and destroy what's left of parliament's reputation.
Ask not for whom Mr Quentin's bell tolls? It tolls for all of them.
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