I was knocking on the doors of Thornton the day before yesterday. I met a couple of pensioners, not just lifelong Labour voters but lifelong ‘Labour people’ for whom the thought of voting any other way was simply unthinkable. But they were disillusioned by all they had seen on the TV that day about the financial misdoings of Labour MPs. So they set me a challenge: “Tell us why you would be different”. What may sound simple, actually isn’t, but I’ll give it a go.

So here are my key thoughts:
• This isn’t just about the Labour Party. MPs of all colours are being implicated. So far, I have seen no coverage of Joan Humble’s expense claims and have no intention of impugning Joan individually unless there is specific reason to. Nonetheless, the Party she represents seems to have participated most in the ‘free for all’ that Parliament’s expenses culture seems to have created. My fear is that many Labour MPs know they are staring down the barrel of defeat, and are in the trough whilst they still have the chance.

• If you want to be an MP, don’t do it because you want to be rich. Public service is a privilege. If you want to ‘make a difference’ as so many say they do, that should be a difference to people’s lives rather than your own bank balance. If you behave otherwise, you deserve everything you get. Merely saying it was ‘in good faith’ or ‘within the rules’ is not good enough. What does that mean? Whose faith? And if the rules aren’t good enough in the first place, that is no defence either.

• Priests, monks and nuns take vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. That might be pushing it a bit far. But being an MP means – or at least it should mean – that you expect ( even want!) to be held to the very highest ethical standards. That is the price you should pay for the privilege of representing your constituents.

• I am gobsmacked at the way in which some have used the ability to switch the designation of their second homes to make sizeable amounts of money playing the housing market. That is an abuse of a system which is supposed only to enable MPs to work in both London and their constituency as effectively as possible.

You have to have some sympathy for MPs. Job security is non-existent since you can be dumped at any time. General elections are a pretty brutal form of job appraisal. But surely that reinforces why you have to operate to higher standards than in other careers? Pay is not high when compared to – say – local government departmental directors on six-figure salaries – but you know that when you put yourself up in the first place.

Very many MPs operate according to the highest standards of probity, but they too are smeared by these findings. Even poor humble candidates such as myself are assumed to be devoting themselves to the cause for the basest of reasons. Yet politics should be, and needs to be, an honourable occupation. A discredited parliamentary democracy is in no-one’s interests. It may not be perfect, but it is the least worst version of governance that civilisation has developed.

Blackpool and Cleveleys needs an MP who can provide community and civic leadership. Not someone – whoever that someone is – who is so compromised by the very fact of having the letters ‘MP’ after their name that they are rendered discredited and ineffective. Parliamentarians debate very serious issues – abortion, euthanasia, social care for the elderly, poverty reduction and so on and on – and need to do so with a degree of moral authority, because like it or not, it is their votes that decide the laws which shape our lives. Yet the curent fiasco has robbed Parliament of moral authority. It will take time to rebuild.

The next generation of MP – amongst whom I hope to find myself – will have to ensure that they honour those who place their trust in them by behaving with equal honour in return.