This isn't even the beginning of the end. After Jacqui Smith, expect a stream of MP expense scandals drip-fed into papers week by week. Rumours abound: is there a mole in the Commons fees office? Is it a Tory? Is someone selling these scoops? One thing is certain: deep-pocketed tabloids are chasing ministers, hiring Benji the Bin Man-type rummagers, bribing officials or just calculating MPs' property profits from expenses. All parties are in for a roasting. In the autumn every MP's bath plug and lightbulb claim will be published. By bad luck, yesterday saw their pay rise by 2.33% to add to public anger.
If moral instincts fail them, then every political sinew should alert MPs to do nothing they wouldn't want splashed across front pages, whatever the custom and practice of the house. Talk to MPs who don't claim much and they boil over at those claiming more than they need. Jacqui Smith calling her sister's back bedroom her main home looked all wrong, even if, apparently, officials said it was OK. The £10 blue movie fiasco is an embarrassing error, but hardly a high crime. For years no spotlight shone in this dark corner.
Now the system must change - and fast. What's up with the dilatory Committee on Standards in Public Life, refusing to lumber into action until September, not reporting until after the next election? This slo-mo response risks bringing the committee into the same disrepute as the MPs. Public thirst for blood spilled over on Question Time when Eric Pickles was booed and barracked for utterly failing to catch the angry moment. He looked shocked: frankly, they all do. If party leaders were wise, they would rush together to announce new rules, draw a line under the past and try to staunch the anti-politician bile. (Read online comments after this for waves of cynical hatred.)
But keep all this in perspective. Our politicians are among the cleanest in the world - 16th out of 180 nations and bunched less than two points from the top, according to Transparency International. Below us are the US, Belgium, France and Spain. But from the uproar, MPs stretching expense rules has been made to look like the pork barrel, backhander and bribery scams that plague other countries.
Let's repeat this: our MPs are rarely corrupt. Our feral press, however, finds growing transparency and freedom of information - brought in by Labour - offers easy meat for cheap stories. These hyped up "scandals" are frivolous compared with serious investigations such as the Guardian's arduous and risky revelations on company tax avoidance. If only more newspapers gave the same space to investigating opaque corporate bad behaviour that they devote to exposés of minor MPs' misdemeanours. Eternal trivia is not eternal vigilance.
But here's the wake-up call. MPs have been caught napping by the new wave of puritanism. Others will now come under unaccustomed scrutiny. Let this be a warning to all public officials, quangos, councils, NHS officials, sports authorities or anyone holding even minor power. Something has snapped. If public trust was always low, it has fallen down a crevasse in this financial crisis.
Historians will see why: people feel a grand conspiracy by a well-paid elite has failed them. They were told this was a golden age, that astronomic pay at the top was yielding rich returns for the nation. They were told their soaring property values came thanks to the brilliance of the governing and banking classes. When your house price rose by £50 a day, why question the very clever, very well-paid people overseeing this great tide of wealth? Polls showed surprisingly little indignation as top pay rocketed. People believed those in power who said the golden geese were delivering the eggs.
But no longer. MPs are getting the first blowback of the new mood. Everyone earning in the top tax bracket had better watch out: the real nature of inequality has been rumbled. Remember, only some 10% of people earn over £40,000. That means 90% earn less. All those with power - leaders, managers, controllers, commentators, decision-makers - inhabit a very small elite paid far above the norm. Median pay is around £23,000, so half the population earns less. Now trade unions no longer have the power to rattle the cage of the powerful, the upper 10% has lost its grip on reality, failing to realise how well off it is. MPs and others feel entitled to more if they compare themselves upwards, with the top 1% earning a monstrous swag. Extreme inequality causes pay dysmorphia - failing to see your pay in proper proportion to everyone else's.
It is unjust that the public sector - less greedy, less rich, more motivated by civic sense - will feel the blowtorch of this new mood. Beware throwing public-sector leaders into tumbrels. But as an easy target in a downturn, they had better cut back those top rates that have been infected by the private-sector pay virus. Meanwhile, businessmen flying "executive" class for no good reason, eating Michelin stars and conferencing in golf-friendly foreign spas pilfer public-company funds from other people's pensions under far less scrutiny.
Beware of joining the general denigration of MPs. There are few Jonathan Aitken bad hats: you know them by the pricking of your thumbs. Most MPs in every party go into politics to change things for the better. A salary set today at £64,766 is fine, but most (not all) could do better outside. Few reach cabinet or even junior office. If they do, their powerlessness can still feel mortifying. Years of weekly graft in constituencies yield little personal benefit: most rise and fall with their party's fortunes.
MPs under collective omerta are usually better people in private than they are allowed to be in public. This era of Labour MPs has rebelled more than any other - though rebellion is not always as honourable as suffering under collective decision. We who comment on them do well to remember how plush is our perch, in comparison.
Those who abuse, belittle and encourage popular contempt for MPs should consider that we need more good people in politics. Observing the excruciating public humiliation of the home secretary's husband for watching a couple of porn movies, with their children cringing indoors, how many potentially good future politicians decided they would rather not invite the world to root through their private life after all?
