“This is supposed to be the mother of parliaments,” said one MP towards the end of last week. “Instead, those looking in think it’s the mother of all sewers. Normal business? There won’t be any till the plague clouds lift.” Another MP put it more graphically: “If this place had a mortuary, the bodies would be piling up. But the catastrophe that’s still to come is when the post-mortems really do begin in earnest. The electorate put us all here, and the electorate will take away one hell of a lot of people: innocent, guilty, by-standers, conspirators, the criminals, those who got caught, those who didn’t. It won’t matter.”