‘Action this day” was the slogan made famous by Winston Churchill. The present generation at the Palace of Westminster prefers “redaction this day”, and the general public’s view of the great parliamentary allowances scandal can be summed up by adapting one of Churchill’s ringing phrases: never in the field of parliamentary conflict was so much owed by so few to so many – and we want it back.

We might also wonder what the great war leader would have made of Gordon Brown’s initial decision to hold the long-postponed inquiry into the invasion of Iraq in private. It is commonly imagined that we live in an age of greater political transparency – but that is not the same thing as honesty.

One of the characteristics of Churchill’s speeches to the Commons about the conduct of the war was that they were frank about errors committed on our own side, in sharp contrast to the absolute refusal of Tony Blair and Brown to admit to any military shortcomings on either our part or that of our allies.

For example, Churchill began one of his Commons speeches in 1940 with the words: “I spoke the other day of the colossal military disaster which occurred when the French high command failed to withdraw the northern armies from Belgium . . . this delay . . . threw out of action for the critical period the whole of the British expeditionary force.”

In Blair-Brown Commons-speak this would doubtless have been described as “a planned strategic regrouping taken in full consultation with our allies”. Or perhaps it would have been redacted for “security reasons” – the ostensible justification for the acres of blanking-out on the officially published version of MPs’ financial claims upon the taxpayer.

Thus, the peroration of Churchill’s Dunkirk speech might have appeared, in the interests of national security, as: “We shall fight on the XXXXXXXXXXX , we shall fight on the XXXXXXXXX , we shall fight in the XXXXXXXX and in the XXXXXXXX , we shall fight in the XXXXXXXXXX . We shall never surrender.”

On the same basis Alfred, Lord Tennyson would have been prevailed upon to “redact” his dangerously revealing contemporary account of The Charge of the Light Brigade: “Cannon to the XXXXXXX of them, / Cannon to the XXXXXXX of them, / Cannon XXXXXXX of them / Volley’d and thunder’d; / Storm’d at with XXXXXXX and XXXXXXX, / Boldly they rode and well, / Into the jaws of XXXXXXX , / Into the mouth of XXXXXXX / Rode the XXXXXXXX .”

The Palace of Westminster insists that it is only out of concern for the physical safety of members of parliament that vast swathes of information have been deleted from the official version of their dealings – information that would have revealed not just their second home addresses (and thereby the extent of their “flipping” for pecuniary gain) but also the top-secret nature of the domestic goods they were buying with our money.

This justification would be easier to take seriously if the Palace of Westminster did not publish on its website an impressive “virtual tour” of the interior, including various offices, which is much more useful to any suppositious terrorist determined on attacking MPs than the publication of their addresses (available anyway on the electoral register).

One of the members most impassioned in his demands for such redaction – in clear defiance of the High Court’s order under the Freedom of Information Act that the Commons should publish the addresses of MPs’ second homes as part of their expenses declarations – was Julian Lewis, the Tory “defence expert”.

He told the members’ estimates committee (which is in charge of the allowances system): “It is quite astonishing that . . . any responsible public body is seriously contemplating for one moment that MPs’ private addresses should be disclosed simply to make it a little easier to check that they are not fiddling their additional costs allowance . . . at a time when the UK is being targeted as never before by organised international and domestic terrorists.”

The truth is that with the end of the Provisional IRA’s military campaign, MPs are less at risk from such organisations than they have been for 40 years. During that era a Tory MP was blown up by Irish terrorists at the Palace of Westminster and the neighbour of another was killed by a booby-trapped car outside the MP’s home. I remember when my father’s name was on a list of IRA targets in the British cabinet; he told me not to come home unexpectedly late at night through the garden of his constituency home, because if I did so the soldier hiding in the bushes might, most unfortunately, shoot me.

I am not accusing Lewis in particular of confecting an excuse based on personal security as a means of evading the full consequences of the Freedom of Information Act– I am sure his hysteria is entirely sincere; but when the House as a whole decided in this way to flout the legislation which it is more than happy to impose on the rest of us, it is difficult not to see this as just the latest in a series of deliberate deceptions of the public.

Since the 1970s governments have conspired with backbenchers to use the additional costs allowance as a means of boosting parliamentary emoluments – tax-free! – but without incurring the public anger that they feared would follow an inflation-busting increase in their official pay. If they had had the courage to make their case openly they would not have faced anything on the scale of the present popular outrage; as always, it is not the deed itself but the cover-up that causes the ruin of political careers.

A now dead member of the Thatcher government told me all of 19 years ago (and I should have published it then): “There is a monstrous deception. MPs don’t like being written to and being told, ‘It’s all very well for you, you’ve got an MP’s salary, while I have to get along on a pension’ and so what they do is have a relatively low salary – although it’s still quite high – and get themselves paid large sums of money in expenses which are not taxable . . . It’s a way of concealing from the electorate.”

If there is one thing even more irritating to the public than a cover-up, it is hypocrisy; and it is this that Gordon Brown has added to the toxic political brew.

The prime minister constantly goes on about the need for what he likes to call “trans-pairency” – but when it comes to the disciplining of MPs abusing the allowances system, or a so-called inquiry into the planning and execution of a war, he cannot bear to expose Labour’s deliberations to the light of day. As a result he looks ridiculous– and ridicule is to governments what garlic and a crucifix are to Count Dracula.

Above all, “redaction” – or censorship, to give its proper name – can make even the most innocent excision appear suggestive of infamy and depredation. For example, the nuns in charge of the Belgian Ursuline convent where my wife was educated used to “redact” both incoming and outgoing letters in an attempt to control the thoughts of their unfortunate pupils.

The girls responded by composing the following redacted version of lyrics from the then popular musical My Fair Lady: “I could have XXXXXXX ed all night! / I could have XXXXXXXed all night! / And still have begged for more. / I could have spread my XXXXXX / And done a thousand things I’ve never done before.”

The case of the redacted MPs’ expenses is more tragic than comic. What other word could we use to describe parliament’s collective ability to send its reputation plunging from the gutter into the sewer?

dominic.lawson@sunday-times.co.uk

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