As with a row of blokes standing at a pub urinal, it isn't done to look. Well, maybe a furtive peek, just to see how your fellow MPs' expenses claim compares with your own - but you wouldn't scrutinise or stare. In my seven years as a backbench MP I can't remember ever discussing with colleagues in any full-on way their own claims or mine. In fatter times it used to be commonplace for journalists to boast among themselves about taking the proprietor for a ride; but in my experience MPs are more sheepish. Their proprietors are the general public: the voters, their constituents. I do recall (as a new young MP) the occasional tip offered with a wink by a florid Sir Bufton Tufton or a beer-soaked, ex-trade-union deadbeat, but not in front of the children, and always in a circumspect way.

It is wrong to suggest, as some think, that MPs have felt no shame about milking the system in the way they have. Their futile attempts to thwart freedom-of-information requests spoke eloquently of their embarrassment. Morally they have tried to justify to themselves this furtive rapacity by reminding each other that if cowardly Cabinets had not kept down the levels of MPs' salaries in order to avoid unpopular headlines, there would have been no need to pump up the expenses system into the grotesque and inflated thing it has become. But that doesn't make it right, and they know it. Few of them are villains and they feel ashamed. They will be reading the details of each other's claims this week with a mixture of dismay at the damage to the reputation of politics generally, nervousness at how details of their own claims are going to look and fascination at this window into their colleagues' habits. Some will think the revelations shocking, others think them predictable. And not a few will find them rather tame.

In truth, they are all three: upsetting but predictable and fundamentally paltry. When, in Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons, Thomas More learns that in return for perjuring himself a young wannabe has been made Attorney-General for Wales, he says, mildly: “Why Richard, it profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world. But for Wales!” Lilies have been gilded and shower cubicles heated, but no fortunes have been made on the back of MPs' expenses. In the end only a range of rusting barbecue sets, redundant sofas and middle-market PVC-framed conservatories stands melancholy witness to a cruel demeaning of democracy by an unwitting conspiracy between a self-harming House of Commons and pious news media.

This relentless kicking away of the respect in which the electorate hold their politicians cannot be allowed to continue. For decades there have been worries that the rough and tumble of politics played out on an increasingly public stage will put the best off ever entering politics. Decent, capable men and women, concerned about their own and their families' privacy, soon won't (it's been said) want to play this game.

I've always taken a sceptical view of these complaints. They sounded like special pleading and there seemed no shortage of candidates for parliamentary seats. This week, however, I've begun to reconsider. It's nasty and it's getting nastier. Can this really be without effect on the kind of women and men we would want to see considering a career of public service in elected office? Is it worth it, only to have your uncleaned sink made the lead story in the Sunday newspapers?

The latest revelations about broken lavatory seats, faux-Tudor beams, Gordon Brown's precise cleaning arrangements or rusks for an MP's toddler will be greeted by an instant barrage of indignation. “How dare they?”, people will ask. “And with our money!” But I suspect that for some readers and voters an interior voice will ask a quieter question: “How would my own monthly housekeeping expenses look, plastered across the front of a broadsheet newspaper?”

For what has been lost sight of over the past 24 hours is that what we are looking at are people's weekly housekeeping bills. Yesterday, as it happens, I bought a bumper pack of toilet rolls from Lidl, six iced buns, a small hacksaw (£1.45), a new tap, four brass plumbing olives and some discounted sausage rolls. The sausage rolls were quite unnecessary. But you neither need nor have any right to know that, though I suppose they'll be indirectly included in the cost of your Times and your BBC licence fee. Many of those who now splutter about a Cabinet minister claiming for a bath plug are the same people who spluttered about the laxity of the previous arrangements when MPs did not have to submit receipts for small purchases. Big housekeeping bills are made up from the accretion of small purchases. Listing them is inherently undignified. MPs are damned if they itemise and damned if they don't.

The question - and the only question, after all the giggling about a Lib Dem MP's Dyson animal vacuum cleaner has died down - is whether in the first place we should be compensating MPs for the cost of keeping a second home by: (a) paying them a salary which allows them to make their own domestic arrangements; (b) giving them a standard, flat-rate, one-size-fits-all housing supplement to their salaries; or (c) trying to frame rules about what's claimable, then asking them to submit receipts.

Unquestionably the worst option is (c). Mr Brown's “clocking-on” allowance was a botched and dishonest attempt to achieve (b) without admitting it.

I'd go for (a). I'd add £30,000 to their salaries (half of which would come straight back in tax) and abolish all their housing and living expenses. And I'd do it before the next election, having secured the tacit agreement of the Opposition not to make too much of it.

And do you know what? After the most almighty hoo-hah for about a week, MPs would still be paid less than many GPs and everyone would lose interest. And at a stroke we would have removed what will otherwise remain a bottomless pit of ammunition for the cheaper-minded sort of MP, for feral parliamentary candidates, for hungry journalists - and for anybody else with an itch to denigrate the honourable profession that, despite this week, politics in Britain still is. Call him what else you like, but does anybody really, really think that Gordon Brown is a crook?

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