Smash hit

New revelations are emerging every day to stoke up the public’s fury and MPs are being left confused at what offences are considered terminal by both the electorate and their party leadership. They are desperate to know when it will end and what the political landscape will look like once it does.

RARELY can MPs have been as reluctant to return to their constituencies as this Whitsun recess. Ever the trooper, Hazel Blears, the cabinet minister in the hottest water over her expenses, spent Friday morning poring over her ministerial red box in the garden of her much disputed “main residence” in Salford, before braving a local summer fete.

On the tough estates in her constituency, the communities minister is seen by working-class folk as “one of our own”. From the locals queueing for ice-creams and wandering around the stalls, there was little of the vitriol that has been directed at her in the toxic cauldron of Westminster.

In a bizarre throwback to the minor celebrity status that MPs enjoyed before the expenses furore, one couple even asked to have a photograph taken with her.

David Cameron’s shadow cabinet were also out on the stump, keeping in touch with Central Office by regular conference calls.

By contrast, the prime minister spent much of the week in his Downing Street bunker. Although he emerged for a number of carefully stage managed visits — to a SureStart centre in Durham and a factory and college in Tamworth — he has been careful to avoid the sort of excruciating television footage that can result from spending too much “face time” with voters.

With colleagues dropping like flies, Gordon Brown busied himself sending out sober communiqués on Burma and North Korea and ruminating about global economic reforms in the pages of the Financial Times.

While his fellow party leaders Cameron and Nick Clegg have worked assiduously to turn the crisis to their political advantage, with the exception of a few worthy interventions about constitutional reform Brown has kept out of the fray, preferring to leave the dirty work of disciplining Labour miscreants to the party’s ominously dubbed “star chamber”.

According to an account by a well placed insider, the one occasion Brown dealt directly with a miscreant, Shahid Malik, his junior justice minister, was a very ugly business.

“After Shahid gave a car crash TV interview about his claims, he got a phone call from No 10 saying he needed to resign in the next 10 minutes,” said the source. “He was told the PM was going to give a press conference any minute and would be announcing the resignation.

“Shahid protested, pointing out he hadn’t been given a chance to give his side of the story and present all the facts and so on. Next thing he knew Gordon was on the phone saying bluntly that he didn’t have time to talk it over with Shahid; he just had to resign.”

Typically, Brown is said to have told Malik, in trouble over rent payments on expenses, that he would be “looked after” — a claim that rings hollow with others who have fallen foul of the prime minister in the past and received similar empty assurances. Most never hear from him again.

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