Despite almost a decade in office, Michael Martin has not been a name that trips off the tongue. Except perhaps his own. And almost everything trips when it comes off his tongue.

Let's face it, most of the time, most of us bumble on, taking the children to school, popping by the supermarket, dredging our own moats of a Sunday, without once wondering about the Speaker of the House of Commons.

The number of people to whom the identity and conduct of this person has been of intense interest has been strictly limited. Indeed, sometimes the lone campaigner for a new Speaker, Douglas Carswell, has had difficulty interesting even Mrs Carswell in the topic. He finishes explaining to her about the kerfuffle in 2003 when Michael Martin outrageously refused to choose the best candidate for Chief Breadstick, only to find that she has turned out her reading light, rolled over and gone to sleep.

It is hard, therefore, to get excited about the choice that now faces MPs. There will be profiles of “runners and riders” with pictures of politicians you do not recognise and details of their “pros and cons” continued on page 94. But hard though it is, the effort will be worthwhile.

For what we are about to discover is whether, after this turbulent fortnight, MPs really get it. Or whether they simply don't have a clue what has been going on.

This whole thing is about more than money. That's the point that MPs need to start with. The money was simply a “gotcha” moment when the electorate found that its MPs were behaving just as they always suspected. This crisis, and the anger it has provoked, comes after years, decades really, of growing disillusion with politics. Of course, there is fury that someone somewhere is getting away with a free toaster, but the ferocity of the reaction comes also from a long-suppressed frustration, from a feeling that politics in this country is broken and no one is doing anything about it.

Mr Martin's departure should be seen as the pivot between two very different ways of conducting politics. It should be seen as the final moment in the long, slow death of closed politics and as ushering in a new age, one that will grow slowly and from small beginnings. The era of open politics.

The cause of this new era, and the need for it, is the information revolution. When the PC was first developed, some commentators suggested that the distribution of data-processing power to households and desktops would change power relations in society. And so it is coming to pass. Even at the most obvious level, if PCs did not exist, the leak of the MPs allowances would not have been possible. But the impact of the information revolution is much more profound than that.

In his book The Long Tail, Chris Anderson points out how the market for, say, books has in the past been constrained by the shop shelf space available to display. Online shopping has abolished this constraint, allowing a much larger range of books, many dealing with topics of niche interest (The Memoirs of Michael Martin, for instance), to be made available.

Something very similar is going on in politics, too. Large centralised political parties were created because of the existence of the mass media. To make any political impact, an idea or an individual had to find a spot in the limited shelf space provided by the big media giants. This prompted individuals to organise themselves into tight, uniform groupings with a professional staff shaping their message for media outlets. As the mass media became stronger, so did whipping.

From this relationship between the media and politicians arose our current form of closed politics. And not all of its features are undesirable, by any means. It is a highly effective way of organising politicians in order to pass legislation. It enables the business of government to be carried out effectively. It ensures, by and large, that second-rate politicians are dragooned into following the lead set by somewhat better polticians.

For voters, many of whom just want to get on with their lives, closed politics reduces the cost of decision making. Instead of being bothered frequently to provide opinions, or having to incur the cost (in terms of time and effort) of choosing between individuals, closed politics packages up decisions and presents voters with infrequent and straightforward choices of party labels.

But whether this system has advantages or not is irrelevant - because the information revolution makes its continuation impossible. The replacement of the monolithic mass media with a much messier, much freer market in information changes everything. The media is fragmenting and taking Parliament with it.

The future of politics in the open era is thus looser, much less whipped, and characterised by the impossibility of anyone cornering political information and keeping it to themselves. There will be more referendums, public consultations, petitions and the like. There will be less central accountability and more individual accountability for politicians. The spotlight now being shone on the behaviour of individuals will not be turned off again.

In the era of open politics things will be less organised and less efficient. It will be harder to govern and pass legislation. Voters will have the power that information gives them, but only if they pay the price of paying attention. Mavericks will make a nuisance of themselves.

Perhaps the biggest irony is that the era of open politics may prove more corrupt. Our closed system allows groups to follow social norms that make sense to them and no one else. That is what happened over allowances until open politics made it impossible. On the other hand, our closed system makes it possible for leaders to police their parties and weed out those who behave badly. In the era of open politics, as everyone raises money and communicates directly with voters, such control will be impossible.

Parliament is in trouble because an institution designed to operate under closed politics has collided with the new realities of the information revolution. MPs need to choose a new Speaker who can see this and who can change the rules of operation, of debate, of general conduct of the Commons to make it viable in this new age. There are plenty of traditional candidates available to them who want to pooter on as before, changing only remuneration. If MPs choose one of them, we will know they don't get it.

daniel.finkelstein@thetimes.co.uk

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