We'd better have some political reform quickly, or else - at this rate - we'll have no women MPs left by the next election. The self-slaughter of Julie Kirkbride and Margaret Moran, in both instances suicides assisted by other women - a Louise Marnell in Bromsgrove, an Esther Rantzen in Luton - reminds me that resentment is more easily focused on female politicians, with their whining insistence on seeing their children or partners occasionally. You may have noticed that the only Cabinet members said to be in trouble over their expenses are Jacqui Smith and Hazel Blears.

And can you imagine what would have been said had it been Harriet Harman, not Alan Johnson, who had gone all commando with her electoral thoughts at the weekend? Shameless baggage! Which thought ends my digression, and shoots this column into the heart of its true subject, the now weirdly fashionable one of constititutional change.

And it is weird. Tony Blair used to say that he could declare war on Iran and no one would notice if he made the announcement in a speech with the word “skills” in the title. “Electoral reform” would have served even better.

Not any more. The subject is so necessarily trendy that party leaders engage in a form of ritual display, like mandrills or baboons, to show who has the biggest and most colourful reform parts. By yesterday the glistening Nick Clegg had outdone everyone by demanding that MPs be locked up over the summer, discussing and enacting a snap radical reform programme. Coming from a young father with a new child who won't be this wonderful age in this season ever again, this zeal was worrying rather than impressive. Or does he not like his kids?

David Cameron, at any rate, had eschewed the drinking of blood and the eating of scorpions, in his rather impressive, though often vague and sometimes plain wrong speech promising one of those radical shift thingies. Why he cannot see that the Human Rights Act has actually brought an important rebalancing in favour of the citizen as against the State, I just don't know.

And then (Gordon Brown being distracted with higher things) there was Mr Johnson's new liking for voting reform. Or perhaps it wasn't new. Perhaps he'd been saying it in unreported speeches for a long time, just as (maybe) Mr Clegg and Mr Cameron had fruitlessly been trying to interest us all in this for years.

Well, we're interested. In fact (he puffs himself up and shows his own peacock feathers), I've always been a supporter of electoral reform, it's just that, well, look, no one much would have thanked me for going on about it, so, er, I didn't. But now the odd crisis of expenses creates an opportunity to hold a discussion about change. You can write about voting for select committees and electing second chambers, without accusations of trainspotting and worse being hissed at you.

So we can resolve that the essential question is how to “reconnect” voters with the political process. Devolution of power, as promised by everyone may help to accomplish this. But what about the voting system for Parliament itself? Are there reforms that will make voting in a general election seem more useful to electors than the present system seems to be?

Elderly people will remember the early “realignment of British politics” days of Tony Blair, when even the most capacious of pavilions seemed inadequate for the number of opponents he wanted to accommodate, and when he commissioned Lord Jenkins of Hillhead to report on possible electoral reform. Mr Blair may even have toyed, momentarily, with the thought of keeping his promise to hold a referendum on the report's contents. In the event, he was easily convinced that his party would not wear it.

The problem that most exercised reformers then was not one of engagement, but of fairness. The debate tended to be framed in terms of proportionality versus governability. The new discussion is different; it's about whether reform could enhance the sense that the political system and political choices belong to the voter. To hold primaries for MP selection would be one way of achieving this, but might not a new voting system be another?

Under our present arrangements most of us are in constituencies that rarely, if ever, change hands, and even where the outcome is less certain, our possible preferences are governed as much by who we don't want to be elected, as who we do. As the Jenkins Commission put it in 1998, “many voters pass their entire adult lives without ever voting for a winning candidate but... they also do so without any realistic hope of influencing a result”.

So Jenkins recommended a system where most MPs were elected using a ballot paper on which the voters would rank their preferences in order. Then, if your most preferred candidate was eliminated, your vote would be redistributed to your next preference until one candidate achieves more than half the vote. This Alternative Vote system would allow voters, say, to go for a Green, knowing that - if their candidate wasn't successful - their vote would not be wasted, but transferred.

Jenkins further favoured a top-up system (similar to the one now used in Scotland) whereby a number of regional seats were voted on separately, and where voters could vote generally for a party or specifically for a candidate.

This would ensure that the system was fairer to “minority” parties. It would also help to prevent the absurdity of there being, say, no Tories in some cities and no Labour members for semi-rural areas. This system is the AV-plus that Mr Johnson advocates and that Mr Brown finds “interesting”.

When, this week, Mr Cameron ruled out proportional representation, he did so on the usual grounds that a weakening of “winner takes all” would lead to secret caucuses and cobbled deals, with the voter excluded. And one would expect nothing else from someone looking forward to the exercising of power on a minority of the votes. But he should look again at AV-plus. The effect is less to drain legitimacy from an incoming popular government than to involve voters more fully in the choice.

Of course, one overwhelming objection to such a reform will be the inevitable assertion that the British people, although now considered fit to have really hard decisions devolved to them, will be unable to cope with two ballot papers and the incredible complexity of ranking a series of things from one to five. But if that's true, we might just as well all pick up our razors and pills and go and join Julie and Margaret.

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