David Davis

There are some MPs caught up in the expenses scandal - on the Labour side the likes of Tony McNulty and Jacqui Smith, for the Tories, perhaps, Alan Duncan - whose discomfiture arouses inevitable feelings of schadenfreude, even glee. But not all. There are also talented, hardworking and apparently principled people on the list. People like David Davis.

A year ago, David Davis was something of a popular hero for his rather Quixotic stand in defence of civil liberties, resigning his seat in Parliament and his position in the shadow cabinet to fight a by-election. He won the by-election, against a remarkably odd collection of fringe candidates; but he was never restored to the shadow cabinet and there are many who think Cameron was glad to see the back of him. Before he became shadow home secretary he was a leading contender for the Tory leadership; and before that he had chaired the Public Accounts Committee with considerable effectiveness, scrutinising waste in public expenditure with a thoroughness we must wish he had applied to his own accounts.

Davis's claim was not the largest, nor the most objectionable. But charging the taxpayer more than £5,000 to pay for a new portico which he could well have afforded scarcely amounts to the type of essential renovation envisaged in the rules. And the £2000 he was paid by the public purse for mowing his lawn may be politically suicidal. It smacks of the privilege and Tory toffery of which David Cameron has been struggling to cleanse the party's image. Davis's claims was endorsed by the Fees Office, but that does not mean either that they should have been or that Davis was right to submit them.

At the time of the by-election, I wrote that Davis had "shown himself a man of principle and courage, and in his magnificent speech he found the voice that eluded him three years ago when he stood for the Tory leadership". I still think that. In the speech, a memorable rallying cry, he stressed that he himself was "just a piece in this great chess game" and that "the British people have grown tired of the inflated, arbitrary and arrogant power accumulated by this Government". He hinted, as did I, that the growing distrust of politicians and the overweening claims of the modern state were to some extent linked. But that distrust is also, and more particularly, bound up with the suspicion that they have personally had their snouts in the taxpayer-funded trough.

The most resonant charge against politicians is hypocrisy: that they impose regulations and strictures on the public or on other industries that they evade themselves; that they write "the rules" largely for their own benefit. But there is slightly more going on. Today's politicians are probably no more venal or self-serving than politicians have always been; and the greater level of scrutiny to which they are now subjected means that most will not even try to get away with things that they might previously have found tempting. There was no "golden age" in which politicians were motivated purely by noble motives of public service. But in earlier times - and even fairly recently - the state was less omnipresent and demanding; it occupied a smaller psychological space. MPs are not the state, of course, but they are the only people on the public payroll who are directly accountable to the taxpayers. As such, they are natural (and often justified) targets for public rage.

There is a danger that Davis - one of the most genuinely honourable members - will be discredited by this affair, and that his cause will be diminished by association. He has been one of relatively few big beasts in Parliament prepared to make a big issue of civil liberties, and considerable personal cost in terms of his career. His record, his public profile and his toughness on law-and-order issues brought credibility to an area that has traditionally been written off as the province of dreamy, hand-wringing liberals out of touch with ordinary people. He was listened to with respect; he had little power, but not negligible influence. It would be tragic if his voice was lost or permanently marginalised.

His self-brought predicament raises broader questions, too. For if such a person can be tainted by allegations of sleaze or the appearance of profiteering then what Gordon Brown yesterday called the "profession of politics" is tarnished indeed.