Hard to remember that just days ago, things looked bleak for shopping. What with the recession and Victoria Beckham making her own clothes, it was in danger of become a lonesome, pariah deviancy. Not any more. The expenses scandal has achieved in six short days what centuries of trying to market shopping as a high-minded activity failed to do: turned it into something that can, without fear of eliciting snorts of derision from the male population, be called Retail Therapy.

Granted the therapy refers to what politicians will need after they’ve paid back the claims on every last bath plug and chandelier. Unfortunately for them, they won’t be able to claim for it.

Such is the excitement that has greeted the news that our politicians are grasping, petty, small-time fiddlers with often quite shockingly bad taste, that there are those who claim that shopping, with its forensic-like revelations, will become the new character profiling.

The main argument for this is that no one needs MI5 when you can simply riffle through a Right Hon Member’s receipts and discover a deep and abiding love for shingles/Laura Ashley/berber carpets (Tories); Ikea, Sky Sports and trouser presses (Lib Dems), dry rot, cleaning and Mock Tudor boards (Labour).

By your consumer decisions shall ye be known, as Jesus could have said. He would have been right, but only up to a point. For while a glitter toilet seat suggests that John Reid, the former Home Secretary, is really a big softie and the attack dog stuff was all just a front, some purchases merely confirm what we already suspected. Margaret Beckett, the Housing Minister, attempted (and oh what depths of disappointment are charted in that one word) to claim £600 for her hanging baskets.

This tells us a) she’s not very savvy compared with Bob Marshall-Andrews (MP for Medway, Kent) who successfully claimed £750 on a “multi-room audio system” and almost £1,300 on an intercom and brass name plaque, and b) she is admirably resistant to the style police who have waged war on hanging baskets since Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen used one to make a manbag.

We see that the Tories have a weakness for horse manure, Agas, Farrow and Ball paint and mole extermination, while Labour ministers are impressively diligent when it comes to claiming for items so small (Christmas tree decorations, a 5p Ikea carrier bag and a 59p chocolate Father Christmas) that most human beings possessed of the embarrassment gene would have said to themselves, No, I may cheat on my wife, lie to Jeremy Paxman and steal from my children but I CANNOT claim for an ice-cube tray.

And finally we are brought face to face with irrefutable evidence that Lib Dems have a fatal weakness for soft furnishing and interior designers.

I think in our heart of hearts we already knew this. We also know, I think, that whatever changes are implemented in the gathering and harvesting of expenses, that loopholes will blossom.

“Win or lose, we go shopping after the election,” said that great exponent of abusing the public’s trust and money, Imelda Marcos. Different winners, same old shopping.

Times Recommends

• Oh no, Darling: you've failed
• BBC survives dogfight over Kennel Club expose
• Where the Rosetta belongs can’t be set in stone