This distortion dates back to 2009 and the expenses scandal, when the perception of the political class shifted overnight. No longer were MPs insincere spinners who occasionally slipped into outright dishonesty, but a parasitic body only out for themselves. The presumption became that they were venal until proved otherwise. But the scandal itself swiftly became a melange of accusations which obscured the reality of the situation.

Lines were blurred between those who made generous claims within both the spirit and letter of the law, those who ruthlessly exploited every loophole, and those who committed wholescale fraud. MPs such as Denis MacShane, jailed for falsifying documents, were spoken of in the same breath as those who had put in entirely lawful applications for fripperies that fell within the rules. It’s unclear whether the most infamous claim of the period, Sir Peter Viggers’s duck house, was even ever paid out.

In the wake of the scandal, MPs’ expenses became the go-to for cheap, anti-political point scoring. Social media accounts regularly pop up criticising MPs for their claims without digging into the detail. Large headline figures are quoted, without recognising this usually includes the MP’s parliamentary staff and constituency offices. Compared with the previous system, parliamentarians find it very hard to pack their pay cheque from official coffers.

At the same time, a second front has opened up against MPs — around second jobs, donations and lobbying. This was renewed this week with the Westminster Accounts, a visually spectacular representation of the funding MPs have received, both for their work for outside interests and as donations to their campaigns and offices. There were headline-catching figures and a strong implication that either MPs were lining their pockets when they should have been tending to the public, or were selling their influence to the highest bidder — or both.

Behind the figures, however, the reality of the scandal seems pretty banal. First, the scale of the money involved was pretty small. The reports confirmed that around £180 million had been paid to MPs and their campaigns in the lifecycle of this parliament. If this is democracy for sale, it is going pretty cheaply. In the US midterms, political funding hit $16.7 billion for federal races alone, with about half of that again spent on local races. Indeed, buying our entire legislature seems to be cheaper than assembling a Premier League-winning side.

This absence of money points to another factor of the so-called scandal — that it is hard to spot where the bought influence has returned very much. Even where the lobbying rules have been broken, the impact seems unclear. Andrew Bridgen, who lost the Tory whip yesterday after comparing the Covid vaccine to the Holocaust, was also suspended from the House this week for breaches around lobbying regulations after he wrote to ministers on behalf of a local company which gave him donations of cash. While our MPs should be purer than the driven snow on these matters, there appears no suggestion that his letters actually obtained any benefit for the company.

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The same is true of the Owen Paterson scandal. In 2021, the MP was first suspended then resigned his seat after breaching rules around donations from Randox, the healthcare company, and Lynn’s Country Foods. Like Bridgen, his “egregious case of paid advocacy” involved writing to ministers. Again, it remains unclear if the companies concerned achieved anything from his actions.

It is, of course, wrong for parliamentarians to sell their influence and access, and even the suggestion of impropriety should be dealt with appropriately. Yet both these incidents seem to suggest that, rather than a corruption-ridden system, we have one where even paid influence has little impact and the infractions come to light quickly. One might speculate that if our system were corrupt, there would be a bit more money in it.

The reality seems that MPs are far more swayed by political arguments than financial incentives. Our parliamentarians sign up to plenty of bad laws or myopic campaigns because they look politically appealing. Often, they take the side where the money isn’t but the votes are. If they were truly on the make, we probably wouldn’t have a housing crisis — but in most cases, a thousand Nimby votes speak louder than the cash the property industry could lavish on them.

Indeed, the real graft seems to be away from Westminster. In 2021, a government inspection of Liverpool City Council found evidence of repeated incompetence and corruption. Last year, in Nottingham, six councillors were arrested for fraud and remain under investigation. In Newham, staff members have been implicated in a £9m fraud involving social and housing and road repairs, while Tower Hamlets has become a byword for electoral malpractice.

While parliament should always be under scrutiny, it is arguable that the suspicion levelled at our MPs exacerbates a wider problem — many of them just aren’t that good. The expenses scandal ushered in a new era of hostility towards parliamentarians, which was turbocharged by the rise of social media. Few sensible people would submit themselves to such hostility.

At the same time, the party selection procedures seem to struggle to find and prioritise effective parliamentarians. Snap elections have seen candidates rushed through who turned out to be successful but wholly unsuitable — Imran Ahmad Khan for the Tories, for example, subsequently convicted of historic sex offences, or the former Labour (now independent) MP Claudia Webbe, who was convicted of harassment. Beyond that, there has been a drift towards more local candidates and more ideologically pure ones — narrowing the pool yet more without really filtering for quality.

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Even within these constraints, the selection processes tend to favour the sharp-elbowed self-aggrandising. The result is a legislature that seems replete with odd characters of dubious skills. Andrew Bridgen has been punished for lobbying offences and his strange embrace of Covid vaccination conspiracies, but he was also found by a judge to have lied in court proceedings during a family dispute. He is not simply lining his pockets, but chaotic in a multitude of directions.

The trouble is, he’s not the only one. There’s a cloud of madness over Westminster which finds its outlet in a variety of ways. Some shill for cranks and vile regimes (whether for money or for free), while others are involved in sexual impropriety (some public, much not but widely whispered about) or are prone to Twitter spats with the public.

There is no argument that our MPs shouldn’t be subject to scrutiny, but the obsession with their financial dealings obscures a bigger picture. Very few are openly venal. Most would earn a better living outside of politics than inside it, and MPs often seem just as swayed by charities and local campaigns than by rapacious corporate interests. Equally, no one really seems to have identified much of a difference in performance between those MPs with second jobs (or even ministers) and those who dedicate themselves full-time to constituents.

But in the rush to pillory MPs for lining their pockets, it feels we might be missing something else. Our system is not riven with corruption, but with inadequates. While many MPs are dedicated and insightful, our parliament is packed with also-rans, has-beens and never-will-bes. It leads to poor debate, poor law-making, and, ultimately, poor government. It’s hard to convey in fancy charts, but we should be perhaps more concerned about the ability of our politicians than some of their outside interests.

Day after day, 10 years ago, The Telegraph brilliantly drip-fed astonishing revelation after astonishing revelation on to its front pages. These stories, drawn from a disc it had purchased from an anonymous source, told of how our elected representatives were greedily rewarding themselves to make up for salaries they evidently viewed as being too low.

Such large news events often have a contradictory afterlife. On the one hand, they seem game-changing. But on the other, once the story has died down, it feels as though it had never happened. In fact, this story may have slipped from the front pages but it sunk down to form part of the deep sediment of the whole flow of politics. The effects of that scandal are one of the underlying causes of the current political crisis engulfing the UK.

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One very clear memory I have of the whole affair is when I bumped into an MP in Parliament Square one morning. Another slew of MPs had just been felled by the day’s revelations, and I was returning from the BBC’s Westminster studios. These were good days for journalists. Not simply for those directly involved in the leak and dissemination of the story, but for anybody reckoned to be in the opinion business. Back then, if an MP caught sight of a comment journalist, they would dart over and desperately try to accumulate some small residue of sympathy in anticipation of the Telegraph’s tumbrils.

The MP I bumped into asked what I thought the effects of the revelations would be. I batted the question back to him. “I think we will see the increasing Lib Dem-isation of our politicians,” this non-Lib Dem politician said to me. It was a slightly curious phrase, and I asked for clarification.

The point this MP was making was not – as I had first confusedly thought – that somehow the scandal would cause a great boost for whatever ideological causes were that month being pushed by the Liberal Democrat Party.

Rather, the point was a social one. The Liberal Democrat party had, in recent years, comprised a group of distinctly indistinct individuals. Noticeable among their traits was how unnoticeable they were. It wasn’t that there was anything wrong with any of them. Or many of them. But almost all of them gave off the aura of being unremarkable local council officials who had, to their only slight surprise, ended up in the House of Commons.

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This wasn’t the case with all of their MPs, any more than the other parties were filled solely with colourful, brilliant and experienced statesmen. But there was enough that was recognisable in the type. My MP interlocutor’s point was that, in the months and years ahead, it seemed likely that the sort of people putting themselves forward for careers in Westminster would change. People with little to lose might make a stab at it, while those with much to lose might think about side-stepping any political calling.

Politics, until then, had attracted a good deal of people who had a variety of lucrative side careers (at the Bar, for instance). There are, of course, those who believe that being an MP should be a full-time job, completely filling every hour of every day, in an endless push of unceasing legislation. But many think politics would be better if MPs were discouraged from being overly busy in the House. One effect of the expenses scandal was to discourage from Westminster anybody who had the skill, ability and sufficient demand for their services to combine two careers. They started to hesitate before considering politics.

The public shaming during that period was such that it (rightly) harmed not just every culprit’s political ambitions but their reputation in every field of their life. As a result, people who did not need this sort of aggravation in their life simply stayed away.

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The advantages of being an MP inverted in a morass of public distrust and dislike. As their reputation plummeted, going in to politics turned from something that might burnish a person’s reputation to something that could only diminish it. Parliament started to look unattractive to people with a lot of options in front of them, attracting people with very few – if any – alternatives.

“No big loss” some people will say. And perhaps they are right. Perhaps Parliamentarians should be solely dedicated to the one job that they have been elected to perform in the House of Commons. But it is futile to deny that such a settled consensus attracts – and creates – a particular type of person. The type of person who is happiest of all sitting on committees, coming up with minor pieces of legislation and disputing with colleagues over these committee and legislative matters.

Perhaps such people are needed in politics. But for a political scene to be successful, it must attract people with a wide variety of skills and attributes. Among them will be those who are distinguished but impatient, those who are daring rather than cautious, and those who are willing to take risks rather than proceeding timidly according to the moment’s norm.

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After a set of embarrassments as comprehensive as those of a decade ago, it was inevitable that things would change. And indeed they did. The expenses system back then was rotten, not just allowing for abuse, but clearly encouraging it. The fact that a number of people went to prison for their extreme version of what most other Parliamentarians were doing was evidence that the system needed exposing and revising.

But as you look around the benches of all the major parties in Parliament today, you will see another effect of the scandal. They are all increasingly filled with people for whom politics is absolutely everything and who, therefore, have very little to bring to it. Few have achieved anything distinctive before heading into it. Few are in demand after leaving it.

The Liberal Democrat MP Norman Baker, for example, went to run a bus company in 2017, after losing his seat in the previous general election. A year later, he announced that he was leaving the role for unspecified future challenges after having “achieved goals“.

Who knows? Perhaps the consequences of this first political earthquake of the decade were among the reasons that the system was so unable to cope with the second. The House of Commons today seems to be increasingly stacked with people who are timid, limited and fearful of taking risks. Perhaps it is no surprise, then, that people with little hinterland of their own can envisage little hinterland for the country they aspire to run.