The row over “Two Jobs” Des Browne is the wrong way round. He should not be both Defence Secretary and Scotland Secretary, but not for the reasons argued yesterday by David Cameron, fellow Tory MPs and the gallant galaxy of former chiefs of defence staff in a recent Lords debate.

There are plenty of serious arguments and criticisms to be made about overstretch of the Armed Forces, their equipment and conditions at home but claims that the Forces are suffering because of Mr Browne’s double-hatting are specious. Whatever one thinks about his record, there is no evidence that he is anything other than a full-time defence secretary.

Lord Boyce was a distinguished chief of defence staff and used to drop Paddy Ashdown off his submarine in the latter’s special forces days. He was heading in the wrong direction, however, when he claimed in the Lords that Mr Browne was “not devoted solely” to his task, and this demonstrated the “disinterest and, some might say, contempt that the Prime Minister and his Government have for our Armed Forces”. That view is widely held but is overblown nonsense. We have a fully committed defence secretary, even though it was politically inept also to make him Scotland Secretary.

The key point is that Mr Browne, and Douglas Alexander before him, do not really have anything to do as Scotland Secretary. The post is redundant and only gets in the way of communication between the Scottish Executive or Government and Whitehall. Alex Salmond does not need an intermediary.

Some residual functions to do with Scottish affairs are not devolved but these could be handled in a constitutional affairs department that would also subsume the Wales Office and, maybe, in time, the Northern Ireland Office. Instead, the Government has gone in the opposite direction by abolishing a separate constitutional department last spring when the Ministry of Justice was created out of the botched split of the Home Office.

Sir Christopher Kelly, the former Permanent Secretary at the Department of Health, looks a safe choice as chairman of the Committee on Standards in Public Life after Sir Alistair Graham’s increasing outspokenness. Sir Christopher is in the mould of Sir Nigel Wicks, chairman from 2001 to 2004, who, despite being a former senior insider at the Treasury, was not reluctant to clash with his former permanent secretary colleagues. Sir Christopher left Whitehall seven years ago and has since chaired both the NSPCC and the Financial Ombudsman Service.

After the long hiatus since Sir Alistair left at Easter, the committee now needs to be relaunched, to demonstrate that it has a role. It should examine two interrelated topics: the allowances available to MPs and peers; and taxpayers’ support for political activity in Whitehall and Westminster, covering special advisers, Short and Cranborne money and the MPs’ communications allowance. At present, there is a populist, antipolitician mood around and such inquiries are necessary to show how the money is being spent and to put allowances on a open, publicly justifiable, basis. MPs can no longer assume that voters accept that British politics is pretty clean, as it still largely is.

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