I agree with the nation’s harrumphing mood. Parliamentary expenses look and are ridiculous. However, it’s not just a recent occurrence. In her first term as prime minister, Margaret Thatcher was presented with a recommendation that MPs’ salaries get a large increase, as they were actually not that good at the time. However, as the nation was in deep dark recession (her doing her level best to make it worse for 90% of the population), she thought that such a proposal would never fly, and therefore expanded the expenses system as a compromise. From then until now, it’s been well-known that the expenses system serves as a form of unoffical salary supplement.

Although, unlike any other salary, it’s entirely up to you how much you wish to claim, up to a certain limit. A good chunk of the expenses MPs may claim is the Staffing Allowance. This enables them to employ secretaries/assistants etc at parliament and their constituency. Altogether, they can claim up to around £150,000 a year to pay staff. What sort of people though? Basically, anybody, Your wife, daughter, son, boyfriend, girlfriend, nice chap you met at a recent party. Open advertising for these positions happens, but it’s not uncommon for family to be given a plum post.

Other allowances include travel, housing costs and on the subject of the latter, ‘flipping’ your home isn’t actually against the law. Anybody can in fact do it, despite all the apoplexy generated in the press. Admittedly it looks a bit tawdry, especially in the middle of a recession and all that, but illegal it isn’t.

Regardless, some of the expenses revealed might well be subject to a collar-feeling or two by the old bill. All expenses and allowances, regardless of what they’re for are technically speaking, meant to be "wholly, exclusively and necessarily incurred for the performance of a Member’s parliamentary duties". Difficult to see how duck houses fit into this, although I suppose shadow chancellor George Osborne’s claim of £47 for two DVDs of himself giving a speech called ‘Value for Taxpapers’ Money’ could fit the bill. Even though this surely takes the biscuit (presumably also claimed for), at least in terms of breathtaking irony.

But there’s more to this froth and fury than meets the eye, the most interesting aspects being what sort of people rule us, both the elected and unelected ones. The basic salary of an MP, allowances aside, is just over £63,000 a year.

This easily places MPs into the highest-paid ten percent of the UK population, but many MPs feel this undervalues them. Even with another couple of hundred grand of allowances added. Having had brief experience of wannabe MPs in London and other junior members of the political classes, one thing I can say without fear of sounding uncharitable is that a sense of entitlement does not rank least-most in their fragrant personalities.

They generally regard themselves as highly educated and employable people, who are doing the rest of us a jolly big favour in sacrificing their expected six-figure salaries, by lowering themselves to come and serve the masses.

The House of Commons is, of course, despite increased female participation, still a boy’s club and the thought of outsiders poking in every corner and criticising the traditions has sent a shudder of horror through MPs of every party. And judging by some of the claims made by people like Hazel Blears, the girls aren’t a lot more restrained in their expense-claiming either.

But should we be so surprised? Our MPs are mostly not, for the want of a better word, ‘normal’ people. They aspire, Labour and Conservative or Lib Dem, to be as successful as possible, and true to the rancid legacy of Thatcher and Blair, ‘successful’ means rich as Croesus.

They aspire to hang around on equal terms with the movers and shakers, the captains of industry. They feel like they don’t have enough money to do this. By the standards of the vast majority of this country, MPs are upper-middle class, even wealthy. By the standards of those they want to hob-nob with, many feel like recipients of JobSeekers Allowance. This feeling gets intensified the further they crawl up the ministerial ladder and can be seen in the dreadful fawning towards the rich and utterly horrible that was rife within New Labour. Peter Mandelson, of course the backside-licker supremo of the plutocracy, is the personification of this ghastliness.

And it is with the seriously rich where this analysis concludes. The scandal of the Parliamentary allowance system was common knowledge within the media classes for years. The proximity of this scandal breaking soon after the banking crisis is not a coincidence.

Following the near-collapse of Northern Rock, and the ignominious bail-outs of the banks with taxpayers’ money, there was a huge amount of public rage at the behaviour of those in the City of London. To a large extent, the newspapers supported and exposed further shameful and bent practices by the banks.

Slowly, however, the realisation must have dawned on the owners of the media that they too are very rich people, sharing many of the tax-avoidance practices that the bankers utilised.

And since the banking scandal, there had been moves by the government to try to regulate the enormous web of offshore banks and tax-havens, where the rich avoid paying what the rest of their fellow citizens have to.

Although, in a typically timorous Brownite way, the proposals offered were watered-down, let’s consider for a moment some of the owners of our press. The Daily Telegraph, which purchased the expenses claims and led the story, is owned by the reclusive and tax-allergic Barclay twins. The Daily Mail, owned by the Daily Mail & General Trust, chaired by Viscount Rothermere, who, according to Private Eye, appears to be in a state of some confusion as to whether he lives in Britain or France. The Daily Express is owned, through holding company Northern & Shell, by Richard Desmond, multi-billionaire porn-mogul and as tax-shy as anyone else in his peer-group.

These papers have been at the fore of stoking up public outrage towards Members of Parliament and I don’t think it’s too cynical to think that as well as an excellent circulation-booster and diversion from corporate financial miscreants, the scandal serves another, more important purpose.

This is a message to the government of Brown and the government-in-waiting of Cameron. Like any mafia dons worth their salt, our press barons made to our politicians an offer that can't be refused. Don’t mess with our money. We know everything you get up to and can and will destroy you.

So then, two scandals. One is the relatively smaller scandal of those who represent us in Parliament, scrambling in undignified fashion to claim every last bit of cash they can, to feed the social-climbing lifestyles they believe are theirs by right. And then there is the larger scandal, of undemocratic multi-billionaires, who own huge chunks of our media, making sure that they have the undivided attention of the political classes. Telling them in no uncertain terms exactly just who runs this town.

Because it certainly isn’t us.