MPs' expenses scandal will define the next election

Ed Miliband, now established as Cabinet’s Mr Clean, has just put on an admirable show of optimism on Marr. He reckons it’s been a bad couple of weeks but come the election people will have forgotten about expenses and will vote instead on the ‘big issues’, namely the economy. Not in the part of rural England where I am, where they are reaching for their pitchforks and coils of stout rope. No 10 clearly still holds to the hope that recovery will save Gordon Brown from what this morning’s polls suggest is going to be a night of fearsome retribution when voting comes. Mr Miliband tried hard to suggest that the revelations in the Telegraph are in some way incomplete and ‘partial accounts’. He said: ‘I don’t think we should judge individuals.’

His restraint is admirable but wrong. Judgement is precisely what is needed, and it is tempting to begin wondering if an early election is the solution, to clean out the place and give a mandate for change to those MPs – and they do exist – who have not abused the system and have been arguing for reform. Liam Fox was less willing to give wayward colleagues the benefit of the doubt by telling the same programme that it was up to individuals to explain themselves. His point about the danger that this will sap public confidence in politics reinforces my sense that an early election will become the rallying cry of reformers.