You know who I feel sorry for in this increasingly nasty Alternative Vote referendum campaign? The Pacific Islanders.

There they were, minding their own business, when they unwittingly became the punchline of a political joke 10,000 miles away in Westminster.

If you’ve been following the issue – and I accept many of you have better things to do – you’ll have heard it. A prominent member of the ‘no’ campaign gets to his feet and announces: “There are only three countries in the world that use AV for national elections: Australia, Fiji – and Papua New Guinea!”

He (or perhaps even she) then bellows with laughter, sits down, folds his or her arms, and smirks as if the matter has been conclusively settled, right then and there.

Like most of the arguments being bandied around, it’s terrible. For one thing, AV is very widely used in other types of election – indeed if our hypothetical politician is a member of the Labour party, he will have used it to appoint Ed Miliband as leader. If he’s a Tory, it was only a variation on the theme that saw David Cameron elected to replace Michael Howard. David Davis actually won the most votes in the first round of that contest.

For another, it suggests there’s something inconsequential about Papua New Guinea, and that this is somehow, mysteriously, caused by their electoral system.

The implication is if we adopt AV we may become like Papua New Guinea – living on isolated mountains and dependent on subsistence farming. That sort of thing.

It’s a nonsense, like so much of the hot air being generated over AV. And why? There are two reasons.

One is that AV is not proportional representation – it is a fairly small, incremental change from the first-past-the-post system we already use. Moreover, it’s mathematically complex, so its effects are not obvious. Most of the arguments for or against it, then, are debatable. The ‘yes’ campaign claims it will push extremist parties to the margins, because they will never garner enough support to cross the 50 per cent threshold. The ‘no’ campaign says it will encourage mainstream parties to seek second-preference votes from those with extremist tendencies. The former seems more plausible – but it’s difficult, or impossible, to prove.

Such a situation is a fertile breeding ground for bad arguments.

The second reason casts considerable light on the state of the coalition. Put simply: supporters of AV, and in particular the Liberal Democrats, are giving the issue far more importance than it actually deserves.

Plenty of us might vote yes, on the basis that AV is very slightly better, and very slightly fairer, than first-past-the-post. (Or to put it another way, the people of Papua New Guinea have a slightly better voting system than we do.) But this ‘miserable little compromise’, as Nick Clegg himself once described AV, is hardly a democratic revolution.

Why are the Lib Dems pushing so hard? Partly because it would benefit them, in terms of the number of MPs elected. But partly, I suspect, because they are using the issue as a pressure valve to vent their frustrations at the coalition itself.

David Cameron has been at pains to try to box off the referendum debate. The prime minister says he and Mr Clegg can take opposite sides – and argue vigorously against one another – without any long-term damage to their partnership in government.

Mr Clegg’s position is more nuanced. Asked directly, he agrees with Mr Cameron. Yet he stoked the flames by describing ‘no’ campaigners, and by extension the prime minister, as a ‘right-wing clique’ – a clear dog-whistle to Lib Dem voters who fear the coalition has dragged their party away from its natural support.

Other senior Lib Dems are openly tying the issues together. Chris Huhne, the energy secretary, wrote to George Osborne demanding he withdrew ‘lies’ about AV making elections more expensive.

“I explicitly warned you the manner of the AV campaign would be as important as the result in the effects on the coalition,” he said.

Labour supporters of an optimistic disposition might wonder if the Lib Dems are trying to engineer a way out of a partnership which has seen their popularity plummet.

May 5 will be painful for Mr Clegg’s party if, as seems increasingly likely, his party is wiped out in local elections and fails to secure a ‘yes’ to AV.

Yet quitting the coalition is hardly a solution. Both Mr Cameron and Mr Clegg knew making drastic cuts would make their parties unpopular until – they hope – a full recovery blooms in a couple of years’ time.

If the Lib Dems leave now, they get all of the opprobrium and none of the future credit. They look indecisive; they look weak; they look, at best, as if they were hopelessly naïve about what coalition would entail.

They look, in short, all those things they worried they looked before, and which they hoped going into government would change.

No, Mr Clegg is locked in to a situation largely of his own making – and more than likely without the comfort of at least securing a ‘yes’ to AV. If he can’t quit, he might at least need a holiday after May 5. I’ve heard Papua New Guinea is nice this time of year.

Attention, reader: are you idly flicking through this paper looking for something to brighten your day?

If so, it is only fair to warn you that this column is largely about the looming council elections.

That’s right, council elections. The anti-Viagra of politics. Even MPs of a certain rank tend to treat them with thinly-concealed disdain. They arrive at the count, shake a few hands, and pretend to take an interest in the rows of council workers, perched behind wonky tables, grimly sorting slips of paper into unimpressive piles.

A glazed look comes into their eyes. They stir instant coffee with already-used spoons. They glance at their watches – surreptitiously at first, later with uncomprehending panic. They ask standard questions of their party footsoldiers. Are we still firm in Lower Chubb? How are the revised bin-collection timetables going down on the doorsteps of Glooming West?

They nod practised, earnest nods as they pretend to listen to the answers.

So if you want to abandon this column now, feel free. But know this: this year, those MPs might be paying a bit more attention. This year, the results might just have significant consequences for the coalition.

There are two votes on May 5: the referendum on whether to replace our first-past-the-post system with the Alternative Vote, and the council poll.

It is the first which has captured the national media’s attention, if not that of the public. It has been said – and unconvincingly denied – that the referendum was the price of Nick Clegg entering a coalition which has largely implemented Conservative policies.

The theory is simple: Mr Clegg has gambled that the British public will vote ‘yes’, and that AV will guarantee future gains for his party. These gains, the theory goes, outweigh any short-term losses caused by the Lib Dems’ apparent u-turns on touchstone issues like university tuition fees.

The theory casts Mr Clegg as a noble martyr, willing to sacrifice his political reputation to secure a brighter long-term future for his party.

But it does the deputy prime minister both too much, and too little, credit.

Too much, because he simply hasn’t shown the strategic insight the theory implies. Bluntly, he has been tactically outmanoeuvred by David Cameron. He failed to predict the anger caused by the tuition-fee hike. He allowed one of his party’s few big-hitters – Vince Cable – to be put directly in the firing line. He has toed the coalition line on council cuts, which have unfairly penalised cities in the north where the Lib Dems have made so much progress against Labour in recent years.

If Mr Clegg really were some strategic genius, willing to lose the battle to win the war, he would at least have limited the collateral damage.

Too little credit, too, because the theory assumes Mr Clegg is a cold-blooded calculator. He isn’t. He genuinely believes in the Lib Dem creed. He genuinely wants to make voters’ lives better. His weakness is not a lack of principle. It is a failure to best use the limited political leverage of coalition to put principle into action.

So the theory is flawed. Yet with his party nose-diving in the polls, Mr Clegg himself seems tempted to embrace it. In an astonishing interview last week, he denied that he and Mr Cameron were ‘mates’ and told how his nine-year-old child asked him ‘why the students were angry at him’.

This was the Lib Dem leader painting himself as the doomed, tragic hero of the sixth-former’s imagination – right down to his admission that he ‘regularly’ cried to music.

Mr Clegg wasn’t talking like this a few months ago. Then he was bullish about the coalition, and his party’s role in shaping its policies. If he now has doubts, it isn’t the culmination of some political masterplan. It is the realisation he has got things wrong.

For Mr Clegg did not want AV at any cost. He thought he could have his cake and eat it.

In any case, would the gamble have been worth it? There is no guarantee the British public will vote for AV. The polls are on a knife-edge. The effect the new system would have can be easily overstated. It would not compensate for the loss of a few points in the Lib Dems’ share of the national vote, for example. If a general election were held tomorrow, the polls suggest, the party would get wiped out – with or without AV.

And what of the long term? The Conservatives learned the hard way that trust, once lost, takes a awfully long time to restore. Even now, in Manchester, the Tories find it impossible to win a council seat. At least they always had the comfort of a core vote in other, leafier, parts of the country. Do the Lib Dems have the same? Can they afford to write off a loss of trust in the north?

The extent of the damage will become clear on May 5. If the Lib Dems can limit Labour’s gains – and their own losses – then perhaps Mr Clegg can put some cheerier tunes on his iPod. If not, he might as well lock himself in his room with a bottle of whiskey and Wagner’s Ring cycle.

For the Lib Dems, then, the vote that really matters on May 5 isn’t the referendum on AV. It is those council elections – dull, unglamorous and yet so very, very important.

Nick Clegg has declared war on unpaid internships.

Meanwhile John Leech, the Lib Dem MP for Withington, appears to be struggling to find an unpaid intern…

Street fires are lit in Piccadilly, Nelson’s column sprayed with anarchist graffiti, bank windows smashed.

Outside the Ritz hotel, a young man – hood down, beer can in one hand – hurls himself boot-first at a door, cheered on by colleagues drunk on their own naughtiness. Later, when all is finally quiet, 214 people will have been arrested and 84 injured.

Another day, another overwhelmingly peaceful protest overshadowed by a violent – and, let’s be blunt, stupid – minority. Throwing bottles at the police is not a policy position. It is a mindless crime.

Such unfocused, childish rage does nothing to turn the mainstream majority against the government. Nor should it. Most of us learn very early in our lives that you don’t win an argument by stamping your foot.

What makes it worse is that, in other parts of the world, we have seen protesters take to the streets to fight for the very democratic rights we take for granted – the very rights that allow large-scale demonstrations in cities like London and Manchester go ahead. In other countries, protesters are risking life and liberty for the opportunity to press their case at the ballot box. The violent demonstrators who trashed London already have this option. Why don’t they pursue it? Because they know that no one would vote for them. They don’t represent anyone but themselves.

Peer through the settling dust of Saturday, though, and there are lessons to be learned – for protesters and politicians alike.

The cuts have made a lot of people angry, and at least some of this anger may be justified. The important questions, though, are difficult. How much should we be cutting? How quickly? And – most crucially of all – is the government cutting in a way that is appropriate, reasonable, and fair?

These are questions that don’t vex the extremists – they are complex, after all, and it’s much easier to simply shout ‘no to the cuts’ and lob a rock – but they are certainly vexing the Labour party. So too Liberal Democrats up and down the country, who will face a day of reckoning with the public much sooner than Nick Clegg and his fellow MPs.

Where do we stand? Even before the global economic crisis struck, Britain was heading for a near-record budget deficit. Labour had been overspending for years – but Gordon Brown largely ignored those ministers who counselled caution. In 2008, the deficit stood at £68bn. The following year, the deficit was £152bn. The collapse of the banks massively magnified the problem; but a problem existed before the collapse.

Put simply: cuts were necessary before. Now the world has changed; they are more necessary, and must go deeper.

Labour still opposes both the speed and scale of the cuts, as we know. But this is a difficult argument to win. The general voter is not an economist; the general voter knows only that our economy is in a mess. At best, this form of opposition is a marker for the future. If rapid cuts cause the economy to nose-dive – and remember, we haven’t felt their full impact yet – Labour will rightly crow that they told us so. If they don’t, George Osborne will deserve the plaudits.

In the meantime, the danger for Labour is that they look unreformed, unrepentant and unrealistic. Ed Miliband’s speech to the TUC march was high on idealism – even quoting Martin Luther King – but low on hard-headed facts and figures. It was a speech to rally a crowd, not to win an election.

If Labour wants to create an argument – and a narrative – they would be better off looking at the specifics. Most people don’t have a view of macro-economics. They notice, however, when their library closes, or their class-sizes get bigger, or their doctor stops offering certain treatments. They might not be able to answer whether such cuts are necessary, but they will notice immediately if they don’t seem fair.

The local government cuts remain the clearest example. Any way you slice the pie, the coalition took a higher proportion of government grant away from the councils that could least afford it – and which happen to be in Labour heartlands in the urban north.

You can argue about whether this was deliberate. You can argue about whether it is reasonable to expect local people to fill the gap with council tax, as the government does. What is beyond dispute is that this is a clear case of ministers taking the most away from those that can afford it least. Opposing that isn’t idealistic, or soft-headed, or vague.

It is also, potentially, hugely damaging to a government which constantly tells us we are ‘all in this together’. When local government Eric Pickles rounded on the people of Manchester last week – telling us to ‘get over it’, without addressing the central unfairness – he immediately cast himself as the foot-stamper.

Mr Miliband – mindful of the dangers of splitting the country on north-south lines, and mindful that no one loves councils – has been reluctant to put such issues at the heart of his opposition. At the very least, this weekend’s mayhem should give him pause for thought.

I’ve been playing around with some new data on council tax.

Generally, when people talk about how much council tax costs in each area, they concentrate on a particular figure: the ‘band D’ rate.

This is the (pre-discount) amount due, per year, for each property that was valued at £68,001-£88,000 in 1991.

It’s one way of doing things, sure. But is it the fairest?

The point is simply this. In many areas, the majority of people live in houses that are substantially below ‘band D’ prices. So the majority of people pay far less than the headline figure.

The data I’ve been looking at corrects this, and also gives an average-bill-per-dwelling figure for each council.

Suddenly, the Greater Manchester-wide picture changes dramatically, like so:

Trafford, which has the lowest ‘band D’ council-tax rate in the region, has one of the highest tax-per-dwelling rates.

And Manchester doesn’t just have the lowest per-dwelling bills in Greater Manchester – it has the third lowest in the country, after Wandsworth (£663) and Westminster (£776).

Speaking of the council cuts, the prime minister has finally intervened.

David Cameron was challenged on the issue by Manchester Central MP Tony Lloyd today.

His response was: “I think the cuts being made by Manchester city council are politically driven and too deep.

“Manchester city council is having its grant cut by 15 per cent – less than my council, for instance, which is being cut by 23 per cent – and yet it is cutting services by 25 per cent. I notice that it still has £100 million in bank balances, and that its chief executive is paid more than £200,000 a year. I think that people in Manchester will look at their council and say, ‘Cut out the waste, cut out the bureaucracy, start to cut the chief executive’s salary, and only then should you look at services.’”

This is disappointing, dangerous – and disingenuous.

Disappointing because I expected a bit more from Mr Cameron. I’ve seen too much of him to subscribe to the ‘Thatcher in disguise’ theory. He has genuinely courted northern cities – not because he expects to win votes there, but because he believes in a one-nation government. A prime minister has to be a prime minister for everyone – not just those who voted for him, or her.

Disappointing, too, because I’d hoped Mr Cameron might engage at a higher level of debate. The salary paid to Sir Howard Bernstein is frankly irrelevant in the context of £170m of lost grant. In any case – of all the council chief executives to single out - Sir Howard is one whose track record in enabling huge private-sector investment in the city stands for all to see. He’s virtually rebuilt Manchester, for goodness’ sake. He could have earned much more in the private-sector.

Dangerous, because now the prime minister has spoken the line has been set. The government has bared its teeth at Manchester. Any hope of a constructive solution appears to have been lost. That is a shame for both parties. Manchester is a Labour-run council that would have been willing to work with the coalition. That would have boosted their one-nation credentials straight away. Instead: a declaration of war. Dangerous for the Conservatives, so soon into their new era of government. Disasterous, perhaps, for the Liberal Democrats.

And disingenuous? I refer here to the figure Mr Cameron quoted. Let me be plain: there is a lot of nonsense flying around about the level of council cuts across the country. Some politicians – and some journalists, sad to say – seem happy for this to become a ‘he said, she said’ row. Manchester claims it needs to cut x per cent. The government counters that the real figure is y per cent. And so on.

But this isn’t a question of viewpoint. At the end of the day, a certain amount has been slashed from the budget of every town hall in the country. Exactly how much is crucial. And – more to the point – there is an objective truth of the matter.

How do we find it? Well, we could start by looking at the figures published by the government on the day the grant settlement was announced. You can find the spreadsheet here.

Now they didn’t make it easy to work out how much grant funding was being cut from each council. For a start, there are various ‘ghost columns’ in the spreadsheet - columns that contain no useful information but make it harder to quickly add up the amount of grant being cut.

Secondly, the spreadsheet adds in a presumed figure for local council tax. Yes, this contributes to the amount each council has to spend. But it is local money, raised by local people – it has nothing to do with how much the government has cut. In any case, councils are far more reliant on Treasury cash than council tax.

So let’s look only at the amount coming from the government. And let’s do the sums – as Mr Cameron suggests he has – for Manchester, and for his local council (West Oxfordshire).

Manchester first. If you add up its formula grant and specific grants for 2010-11, you get £485.7m. Do the same for 2012-13 – and add in the new NHS grant, which is money given for new council responsibilities – and you get £383.6m.

That is a cut of 21.02 per cent in government grant.

Now, West Oxfordshire. Now this is a tiny district council in a ‘two-tier’ area. In other words if you live in West Oxfordshire – in Mr Cameron’s constituency – then some of your services will be provided by West Oxfordshire council. The majority (certainly of the expensive ones) will be provided by Oxfordshire County Council.

Here’s where Mr Cameron is right: West Oxfordshire goes from government grants of £6.4m in 2010-11 to £4.53m in 2012-13. That is a whopping 28.7 per cent cut.

But wait. Oxfordshire County Council goes from £184.3m to 163.2m. That is a cut of just 11.43 per cent in what is a much, much bigger budget.

Sadly, we can’t easily work out what proportion of Oxfordshire’s budget goes on the good people of West Oxfordshire. We can, however, do something else. We can add the government grants to all the districts in Oxfordshire to the grants to the county council.

That way, we can see how much has been cut from the council grants spent on the people of Oxfordshire as a whole.

The result? Down from £234.6m in 2010-11 to £198.9m in 2012-13.

A reduction of 15.1 per cent – far less than Manchester in a county that is, by any measure, far less deprived.

I would encourage you - fellow journalists in particular - to do the sums yourself rather than relying on press releases, unattributable ‘briefings’ and hand-outs. The same pattern emerges across the country. Northern, urban councils do badly. Southern, rural councils do better.

And that, I would say, is unfair.

Does Manchester council waste money? Do people have ‘non-jobs’? To some extent, probably, yes. The MEN has certainly highlighted examples of both over the months and years. But I do suspect you’d find the same in any large organisation, and certainly any large council; even, dare I say it, Oxfordshire County Council.

The fact is, ‘council waste’ is one issue. The fairness of the settlement is another. This settlement seems to penalise more deprived communities. That, in my view, is wrong.

If Mr Cameron wants to argue the opposite, fair enough. But let’s do it on the basis of facts - his own government’s facts, published on his own government’s website. And let’s be honest about the central issue, rather than throwing smoke about ‘non-jobs’ and statues and comedy courses and chauffeurs.

It’s the right thing to do – and it’s the prime ministerial thing to do.

Oooh, those controversial Manchester council cuts. Readers of Monday’s MEN will have seen town hall chief Sir Richard Leese arguing that Manchester had been unfairly targeted with a 21pc cut in its grant.

His article caused a bit of a stir.

Here is an extract of a first edition of today’s Daily Mail:

Hmm. Look at that last paragraph again.

One presumes Mr Hammond was so ‘outraged’ by Manchester’s cuts that he forgot no one actually died in the 1996 attack.

The last time I spoke with Andy Coulson, he was sitting on a bed with David Cameron. It was a characteristically practical solution to a practical problem: we were in a suite in the Hilton Hotel, and there was nowhere else to do an interview.

But it was also an obvious metaphor. Not only about how close the two had become, but about Mr Coulson’s role. For all Mr Cameron’s impressive political and presentational talents, he lacked one thing: an instinctive understanding of working-class, largely urban voters. At least part of Mr Coulson’s brief was to get those people in bed with the Tories.

In a sense, he has delivered. The Conservatives have won the biggest battle: the battle over cuts. Polls show a majority of people accept that they have to be made, and on the scale the government proposes.

But the support is fluid. If the cuts are made in a way that seems unfair – that penalises the people who are most vulnerable – support for the project could disappear very quickly indeed.

In the recent past, the Tories have been highly attuned to this danger. In the run-up to the general election, Conservative ‘big beasts’ roamed all over the northern conurbations. They promised to protect the economy of Greater Manchester, and places like it. They made spending commitments – on projects like high-speed rail – that went beyond what Labour was offering, and which played much better in the north than the south. Maybe, muttered friend and foe alike, Central Office finally ‘gets us’.

Contrast that with the coalition’s attacks on Manchester council in the past couple of weeks. Town hall bosses were outraged to learn they faced a 21 per cent, two-year cut in their central government grant – more than almost anywhere else in the country, and twice as much as many affluent southern shires. Some 2,000 people will lose their jobs. Services will be slashed – and this in a city with some of the worst deprivation in Britain.

Now look at the response. Conservatives and Lib Dems, nationally and locally, have pointed at the salary of chief executive Sir Howard Bernstein (even though it is lower than his counterparts in Liverpool and Lancashire, and far lower than the £357,000 earned by Gerald Jones in Conservative-controlled Wandsworth). They have raised questions about individual council posts, and council projects (a stand-up comedy course in Wythenshawe costing – wait for it – £20,000).

What they haven’t done is address the central, glaring, indisputable unfairness. One of Britain’s biggest councils, in an area where people depend on the public-sector, is suffering one of the biggest cuts.

No; they have reverted to the politics of the playground.

It is disappointing enough that Westminster MPs should indulge in Manc-bashing. It is a tragedy that we should hear the same from local politicians on our patch. Carefully built-up cross-party alliances in Greater Manchester – alliances forged for the benefit of the entire city-region – are crashing down around our ears.

For modern-day Manchester is not like Liverpool in the days of Militant. The town hall has proved itself more than willing to work with a Conservative government in the past. It has used limited public-sector money to lever in huge amounts of private-sector investment – enough to rebuild the city centre and create the business sector in Spinningfields. Banks, legal firms and other blue-chip companies have flocked to Manchester, creating tens of thousands of jobs in business which have rippled out to the other nine boroughs in the area.

A U-turn on council spending settlements would be politically impossible. But there were practical, productive and smart ways of calming the waters. The government could have made other funding streams available to councils like Manchester, that had a track record of success. It could have promised to work with northern cities to ensure services to the most vulnerable were protected. Instead it got out its bluntest weapons and went on the attack – urging footsoldiers on the ground in Greater Manchester to do the same.

For all this, sad to say, has the whiff of a media response devised and signed off at the very top. It happened on Mr Coulson’s watch. The man who was supposed to give his boss the common touch – the man who was supposed to make sure we really were ‘all in it together’ – failed at the very last.

For Mr Cameron, then, a short-term loss could be a long-term opportunity.

The two names in the frame to replace Mr Coulson – Ian Birrell, Ben Brogan – might both urge the virtues of re-extending the hand of friendship to Manchester and the north.

For Labour, the tumultuous events of this week present the opposite problem.

Alan Johnson – like Mr Coulson – was supposed to be the man with the common touch. But a common touch is hardly the first thing you look for in a would-be Chancellor of the Exchequer. Gordon Brown never had it; what he did have was huge political presence and a formidable grasp of economics. Mr Johnson was always the wrong man in the wrong job at the wrong time.

Ed Balls – who backbenchers say has been whispering about Mr Johnson since his appointment – clearly considers himself the right man at the right time, and has got his way.

Doubtless he will sharpen up the exchanges with George Osborne and score some political points. But he remains an ambitious man and is no natural ally of Ed Miliband.

A short-term gain, then; but you would think Labour would know better than any party the risks of serious friction between the leader and the man next door.

Labour’s handsome win in the Oldham East and Saddleworth by-election won’t capsize the coalition. But make no mistake: the ride is getting rough.

Captain David Cameron will not be overly worried by the result. Despite his party’s claims it was ‘fighting to win’, it was a deliberately half-hearted Tory campaign. This was a major Liberal Democrat target seat. The coalition is passing through choppy waters. The last thing it needed was a bout of infighting that could have ended with all-out mutiny.

The Lib Dems – who genuinely believed they could win this ultra-marginal seat they lost by just 103 votes in May – face a deeper problem.

So what happened? The signs are that a number of Tory voters switched to the Lib Dems – but even more Lib Dems switched to Labour.

That will be a major concern to Nick Clegg’s party. They simply cannot afford to lose too many votes to Labour in the north, where they have made so much progress as a centre-left alternative.

There is a danger of overstating the importance of by-election results. The government of the day rarely wins.

Nonetheless, the unexpected scale of the victory is significant. Labour will be encouraged that Ed Miliband is beginning to make progress after a lacklustre start as opposition leader.

The Conservatives – particularly in light of the row over Manchester council’s swingeing job cuts – will be forced to fend off claims they are reaping the harvest of abandoning the north.

And as for the Lib Dems? They might well be wondering what they are getting out of the coalition. They will cling to the mast – but as much of necessity as of choice.

I never got to know David Chaytor particularly well – but then neither did a lot of his Labour colleagues in Westminster.

The disgraced former MP for Bury North, who was last month sentenced to 18 months in prison for falsely claiming £22,000 in expenses, had few close friends in the House of Commons. He was something of an enigma – never rising to any political rank, and seemingly happy to sit on the backbenches and get on with his constituency work.

Mr Chaytor painted himself as a man of Leftish ‘principle’ – he voted strongly against the Iraq War – but in fact this only makes his crimes, and the fact he tried to avoid justice by claiming parliamentary privilege, seem worse. His time in jail will be difficult. But if he really is a man of principle, the knowledge that he will forever be remembered as the face of one of the great parliamentary scandals of our time will be much greater punishment – and one that will last a lifetime.