Over the weekend I’ve been troubled by a philosophical question – is it preferable for our politicians to be dishonest or incompetent? In an ideal world it would be better for them to be neither, but sadly those are not the days we are living in.

There has always been a suspicion that too many of our elected representatives weren’t to be trusted, but more from experience of broken promises than allegations that they’ve been pilfering our hard earned cash.

Rik Mayall’s brilliant creation Alan B’stard has begun to look worryingly believable over the past week. But in a departure from B’stard’s clinical destruction of his accusers, the fashionable defence these days seems to be that MPs have got their personal finances in a pickle because they are impressively stupid.

For an MP to claim £16,000 to cover mortgage interest on a loan that has been repaid is an oversight on a gargantuan scale. But accounts do get muddled when you’re busy – and, hey, it’ll never happen again. Until the day after. And amazingly the next overworked bleeding heart who had claimed for interest on a repaid mortgage did so by mistake as well!

Now I don’t class myself as a gullible idiot, but I have for many years broadly believed what politicians told me, particularly on legal matters. A few years ago I was convinced that the homicidal Iraqis could deploy a missile within 45 minutes that would hone in on my garden and wipe out my begonias. So much so that I covered my garden shed with silver foil and filled it with cans of baked beans and corned beef. Boy, did I feel silly?

But let’s just assume for a moment that these oversights were actually innocent errors. I must say, in that case, I’m not entirely comfortable with the idea that our elected representatives are so stinking rich that they wouldn’t query an erroneous five figure sum dripping into their bank account, or forget that they’d repaid the relevant loan, until the Daily Telegraph ran a story on it. Obscene wealth combined with financial ignorance isn’t an attractive proposition for the electorate.

And you’d think that claiming £800 a month for food would not only raise eyebrows in the fees office - but more menacingly would prompt a knock on the door from the Department of Health’s obesity police.

The highlight of the week for me was Margaret Beckett, in a hilariously stupefying onslaught on Question Time, accusing the Telegraph of scattering the personal data (including bank details) of MPs, and more importantly their unsung band of support workers, into the public domain. I wouldn’t worry about it too much Mrs B. The DVLA and HMRC did exactly that to twenty five million of us two years ago – but it was a mistake.

So back to my original dilemma. We certainly don’t want heads of state that are both dishonest and incompetent. It might be fun but we can’t seriously entertain the thought of housing Dick Dastardly and Muttley at numbers 10 and 11. Having said that - at least they’d have an enthusiastic stab at clearing some of the pigeons from Trafalgar Square.  

So no, we don’t want incompetence or dishonesty. And thank goodness we can believe that we have hundreds of MPs who are neither. So I suppose in the end I’ve come to the conclusion that there are just too many of them.   

Stuart Wilkin writes for Insider

www.insidermedia.com