Rules and reason
Earlier this year I was discussing the Welsh Labour leadership with a Welsh Labour MP and asked how much support there was amongst his Westminster colleagues for Huw Lewis, the Merthyr AM.
Wrong name.
He'd burnt his bridges. I asked why. Because along with his wife, Torfaen AM Lynne Neagle, he'd pre-empted criticism of the £22,000 claim they'd made on buying and furnishing a second home in Penarth by announcing a plan to repay to the Assembly authorities any profit made on it. It wasn't after all, they said, an investment opportunity. They'd bought the house so they could do their jobs.
Make of that announcement what you will but in the eyes of quite a few of Mr Lewis' Westminster colleagues, it just wasn't on.
It wasn't that he'd gone and done it the night before AMs' expense claims were about to be made public, giving away his obvious discomfort with the kind of figures you and I were about to see. It was that he shouldn't have gone and done it at all. Why? Because it reflected badly on everyone else who kept any money they made on homes subsidised by the taxpayers. You didn't do that to your colleagues.
And there you had it - the gulf between what those taxpayers or voters think is just and fair and what MPs have come to regard as reasonable. They say obeying the rules. You increasingly say abusing the system.
At the "Ask Rhodri" event one questioner listened as the First Minister, in an attempt to justify some aspect or other of Assembly life, threw in a comparison with Westminster. Oh forget that, she responded, "Westminster impresses no-one these days".
It's hard to imagine that changing very much as the Daily Telegraph start planning tomorrow's headlines.
I'm Betsan Powys, Ö÷²¥´óÐã Wales' political editor. I'll be blogging the inside track on .
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