I have yet to meet an impoverished MP. I have met many angry MPs though. Angry at the thought that their expenses might be made public.

Let’s be clear. Most MPs are hard working and honest, but the Gentleman’s Club of Westminster has a strange way of creating rose tinted spectacles for its occupants.

Over the last year a few of us have furrowed a rather lonely brow in challenging the orthodoxy that the MPs expenses should be cloaked in secrecy and that major misdemeanours should be dealt with privately.

Don’t feed the media beast, senior backbenchers have muttered whenever journalists take interestbrendan.carlin@. But it the lack of transparency that feeds this animal.

Nobody can defend the actions of Derek Conway. Similarly Caroline Spelman knew precisely what she was doing in employing her nanny. Yet David Cameron chose to cover up his political ally Spelman, whilst promptly dispatching his arch enemy Conway. Cameron may be riding high in the polls, but such duplicity may come back to haunt him.

Not only has he delayed on withdrawing the whip from Spelman, but he knows that on two occasions his whips office have been given detailed evidence about Spelman. As long ago as 1999 they held an enquiry into her and told her to change her arrangements. Why has Cameron not given these notes to the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards?

The truth is that Cameron has fallen for into the old Gentleman’s Club comfort zone- we the politicians know better than the people. Not surprisingly Cameron backs the current system of property accumulation through Parliament.

The tortuous logic of the current system defies belief. Only now is it proposed that you cannot have the taxpayer pay to remove moss from your garden or restock your flowerbeds. I naively asked for a train season ticket, but was refused because I might over use it. Apparently I might choose to commute 400 miles a day by train and claim a second home allowance. As I pointed out, my last train goes an hour before Parliament ends on an evening. But if I live on the outskirts of London I can drive home very regularly, claim mileage and have a second home. Why not give us all a train season ticket and negotiate a good deal with the train operators?

I could have claimed for a plasma TV for my room in Waterloo, but I could not claim for all the necessary additional security at my family home in the constituency because of death threats stating that they knew were I lived. I cannot save the taxpayer money by getting a two bed flat and sub-letting one room, but I could have set up a trust to pay rent for a property that I already own.

The dark arts experts of the Tory whips office have targeted me- how dare he expose our wrongdoings! First they persuaded genial retiring MP Malcolm Moss to have a go. Only the Independent was gullible enough to fall for that one and Malcolm then had to quickly put right his own failure to declare his elephant spotting trips. Conservative central office desperately emailed around a second story, so hopelessly inept that journalists didn’t even bother to contact me. And Greg Hands MP, the youngest old fogey in town had a cack-handed go, leaving the Telegraph in fits of laughter at his desperate attempts at creating an issue. I was told that the Tory dogs of war had been unleashed, but it was more like timid hamsters.

Why bother- what are they all so afraid of? I think they fear the consequences of losing the preferential tax status of MPs and it is this that the Members Estimate Committee mysteriously ignore.

MPs can use their second home allowance to buy a house or flat. They take the risk on the property market, so there is a case that can be argued that this is as cost efficient as staying in hotels or rented property. Those struggling to get on the property market may be miffed, but there is no scandal.

However if an MP has re-mortgaged their property in order to claim the full allowance and for no other reason then there is a real case to answer. If an MP moves up the property ladder they can do so, even with the new proposals, to their hearts content and at the taxpayers expense. This cannot be right.

MPs can nominate one main home for capital gains tax purposes and a different for their Parliamentary second home allowance. This is the really big fiddle and one that is quite legal.

Parliament allows itself the luxury of this preferential tax treatment and the Members Estimate Committee scandalously ignores this well known scam. On Thursday this loophole should be closed once and for all. The main home should only be the one as defined by the Inland Revenue.

Until Parliament removes the preferential tax status of MPs then we have no defence against the request that our second home address is published. MPs fought this week to berate the information commissioner over the likely release of second home addresses. Equal vigour on Thursday in making MPs equal in tax status to our constituents would be a pleasant surprise.

Simple, easy, non bureaucratic systems are what the public want. Government civil servants in Bristol, Leeds and Newcastle already have set rates for London allowances. Why do we not use existing systems? Openness and transparency are the order of the day. My constituents are free to criticise my every action, every vote and every penny spent. I should not be free to hide this information from them. This is the cut and thrust of politics. The price we pay as politicians is that our lives are out in the open. If we do not like that price, then there are plenty more people out there happy to replace us.

John Mann MP, July 2008