It’s bonfire night, and once again poor old Guido gets it.

Up and down the country he will be burned in effigy for the dastardly crime of trying to blow up the Houses of Parliament over 400 years ago.

But wait — after all the moats, duck houses and house-flipping of the past 12 months, should it not now be conceded that he might have had a point, even if his methods were a little extreme?

With Westminster held in little more than contempt by many people who have been appalled at the greed and sharp practice of some of our MPs, surely Guy Fawkes should — maybe for just one year — be regarded as more of a hero than a villain. A sort of sabbatical from the day job.

That of course would leave a vacancy on top of all the woodpiles stacked waiting and ready for tonight.

Who should we put there instead?

Television host, journalist and reality TV star Esther Rantzen is to stand as an independent candidate in the Luton South constituency at the next election.

Rantzen’s interest in running for office was sparked after the seat’s Labour MP Margaret Moran was caught up in the parliamentary expenses scandal.

According to the Daily Telegraph, Moran claimed 22,500 pounds for dry rot repairs for her second home in Southampton, nearly 80 miles from her constituency.

One small snag for Rantzen is that Moran has already said she plans to stand down.

“If you’re going to stand as an anti-sleaze candidate surely it would make more sense to stand against an actual wrongdoer,” said the Conservative candidate for Luton South, Nigel Huddleston.

Rantzen, 69, insists she is standing because of the local support she has received in her attempt to take advantage of a “new wind blowing through the world of politics and maybe bringing some fresh air with it”.

Writing in the Guardian newspaper, former independent MP Martin Bell warned Rantzen to expect a rough ride in the coming months.

“She can expect to have her record gone through with the finest-toothed of combs,” said Bell.

“I hope that she joins the handful of independents - most of them local heroes rather than celebrities - who have an unusual chance of being elected to the Commons. Our dishevelled politics needs them.”

What do you think of Rantzen’s decision to stand? Will it help clean up our “dishevelled politics”? Can independent candidates make an important contribution to the running of Parliament? Or is she jumping on a publicity bandwagon?

Probity is Britain’s new watchword. After filleting the bankers over their salaries and bonuses and excoriating MPs for fiddling their expenses we’ve now turned our attention to the antics of journalists.

The News of the World (NOTW) has frequently embarrassed politicians, vicars, footballers and celebrities, but the Sunday red-top is currently itself the target of an expose by a broadsheet.

According to a report in The Guardian, reporters at the “News of the Screws” worked with private investigators to access “two or three thousand” private mobile phones belonging to celebrities, MPs and public figures.

Those private investigators apparently intercepted voicemail messages and gained access to personal data such as itemised phone bills and bank statements.

But  police have said they have no plans to reopen a 2005 investigation that led to the jailing of two men, News of the World reporter Clive Goodman and a private investigator, for hacking into the phones of staff working for the royal family.

That raises the question as to whether that decision should be taken by an independent body rather than a policeman choosing not to rake over the coals of a fellow copper’s report.

While the police ponder, the Press Complaints Commission has once again proved to a be a less than an effective regulator.

Rupert Murdoch has ”nothing to say at all” on the story, while former NOTW editor Andy Coulson, who is now the Conservative Party communications chief apparently knew nothing. Funny how journalists and ex-journalists get all tongue-tied when they are being asked to give answers rather than the other way round.

The Daily Telegraph has been criticised for paying hundreds of thousands of pounds for buying information that allowed it to gain access to MPs’ expenses claims, but at least the right-wing broadsheet could claim a public interest defence.

Not so the alleged NOTW fishing operation of celebrity tittle-tattle, which tells us much about the agenda of many of our national newspapers.

A committee of MPs is due to re-examine the phone-hacking scandal, but maybe Britain’s newspaper reading public could take the matter into their own hands. On Merseyside, 20 years after the Hillsborough stadium disaster, nobody buys the Sun newspaper over the way the tabloid covered the death of 96 football fans.

That’s probably an idiot’s utopian idea, so in the meantime how should Britain regulate its press? And under what circumstances is electronic surveillance permissable?

“Don’t give the Queen any more of our money, Republic, the campaign for an elected head of state, pleads in a statement on its website.

Royal expenditures rose 1.5 percent to 41.5 million pounds in the last financial year, after allowing for inflation.

Buckingham Palace says this is good value - equivalent to just 69 pence per person in Britain.

Republic says: “With that sort of accounting you can justify pretty much anything.”

What do you think, is the Queen worth 69p a year?

The online release of MPs’ expense claims has only served to further dent their already battered reputation.

Forty-two days after the Daily Telegraph began to investigate MPs’ expenses the Houses of Parliament finally got round to publishing official details of them. Or rather it didn’t, as lots of key information was blacked out.

Britain’s newspapers spelt out their condemnation - in black and white - of this supposed exercise in freedom of information.

The Sun labelled MPs “Blankers”, the Daily Mirror led with the headline: “Blackwash”, while the Daily Mail posed the question: “Just how stupid do they think we are?”

Commons officials insisted that the information that had been blacked out was done to protect MPs’ security, but the consensus of Britain’s media was that the political classes had shot themselves in the foot.

“Yesterday’s exercise in obfuscation suggested the House of Commons has learnt nothing,” opined the Daily Telegraph’s editorial, with the paper promising to publish an uncensored version of every MP’s expense claim on Saturday.

“The Portcullis House edition of the dossier does not so much slam the door behind a bolted stallion as painstakingly construct a new stable in order to house a dead nag,” wrote the Guardian.

The farce was meat and drink to cartoonists. The Guardian’s Steve Bell captioned his cartoon with the statement: “Justice must not only not be done, it must not be seen to not be done.”

Even advertisers got in on the fun with a Volkswagen advert having most of its words crossed out.

Lest your mood has been overly blackened, remember that at least we have learnt a new word from this very British political scandal. Hands up who knew what the word “redacted” - to make ready for publication; edit or revise - meant 42 days ago?

The question is now how are MPs going to redact their reputations?

The winds of change are sweeping through a dusty Houses of Parliament as the race to succeed the Speaker of the House of Commons Michael Martin hots up.

With MPs trying to get their house in order as the expenses scandal rumbles on, the election procedure for the new Speaker has had a makeover, with election hustings to take place for the first time.

Organised by the political research charity the Hansard Society the hustings will televised, with would-be candidates publishing manifestos and campaigning ahead of a secret ballot by MPs.

So far so good.

Until that is you peruse the list of the 11 candidates jostling to succeed Martin.

Former Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett, Frank Field and Parmjit Dhanda are the Labour MPs who have thrown their hat into the ring.

Conservative backbencher John Bercow is the bookmakers’ favourite, with Tory MPs Sir Patrick Cormack, Sir Alan Haselhurst, Sir Michael Lord, Richard Shepherd, Ann Widdecombe and Sir George Young also in the running. For the record that’s just four Sirs on the Tory shortlist.

Sir Alan Beith is the sole Liberal Democrat candidate.
It would be interesting to find out how many members of the public would recognise any of these candidates if they were shown mugshots of the MPs.

No doubt caravanners would know who Beckett is, while Widdecombe’s appearances on television programmes such as Have I Got News For You and Celebrity Fit Club probably make her the most recognisable of the aspiring Speakers.

But why does the Speaker have to be an MP, given their political affiliations and the fact that they must remain impartial in chairing debates in the Commons chamber.

So for a bit of Parliament X-Factor what about Sir Alan Sugar, Simon Cowell or Joanna Lumley for Speaker?

You decide.

The Guardian newspaper, normally a Labour supporter, has decided Gordon Brown must go.

“It’s time to cut him loose,” it declares in an editorial that goes on: “The public is calling furiously for a better system. People want an honest parliament. They want leaders who are prepared to act. They loathe the old system, and many of the people who are part of it.”

Brown, it says, has left it too late to change anything.

And yet it was only a few months ago that the same paper was carrying cartoons portraying this apparently now fatally wounded figure as Superman, as Britain took the lead in dealing with the world banking crisis. Few analysts dispute that he remains the master of his economic brief.

He may not have the political savvy of Tony Blair and his awkward mannerisms in front of TV (and YouTube) cameras do not serve him well but most observers agree he has always been a figure of moral integrity. Early on, he won plaudits for his opposition to the super-casinos plan, he was lukewarm at best about the 2005 extension of drinking laws and he is far from being one of the worst expenses offenders.

Are people being too hard on Brown, making him a scapegoat for the expenses crisis?

Can he, should he, stay on?

The expenses scandal has claimed two more victims – one from each side of the House.

Labour MP for Luton South Margaret Moran has announced that she will stand down at the next election, while Conservative MP Julie Kirkbride will no longer represent her Bromsgrove constituency after the likely 2010 poll.

Both MPs have defended the expenses they have claimed, arguing they have taken the decision to step down as a way of ensuring their respective political parties’ chances are not damaged at the next general election.

But Moran has claimed the stress and “health problems” the furore has caused her, while Kirkbride is worried about the effect the intense media spotlight has had on her family.

Which begs two questions.  Have Moran and Kirkbride been given rougher treatment by the media because there are women? And will Parliament struggle to find candidates of a suitable calibre to stand as MPs in the future?

The scandal engulfing British members of parliament over their often startling expenses claims has started to bring down some prominent victims: the speaker of the House of Commons, two Labour Party MPs and four from the Conservatives at time of writing.

The Daily Telegraph, which obtained a disk containing unexpurgated details of claims for moat dredging, floating duck houses, plasma screen televisions and reimbursement for mortgages long paid off, is now on Day 19 of its unremittingly lurid revelations.

It’s hard to imagine that there can be much more of this, at least as far as the House of Commons is concerned, yet there probably will be.

Some political commentators are now beginning to wonder where else this story will lead.

One group of lawmakers has long been the target of stories about their expenses — members of the European Parliament.  As this clip from RTL television shows, some of them are not too happy to be held up to scrutiny.

Britain’s anti-sleaze chief Sir Christopher Kelly, Chairman of the Committee on Standards in Public Life, has said the MPs’ expenses scandal is worse than the infamous cash for questions affair that did so much damage to the John Major adminstration in the 1990s.

In that celebrated scandal, which fatally undermined Tory MP Neil Hamilton’s political career, Harrods owner Mohamed Al-Fayed alleged he had paid two MPs to table parliamentary questions on his behalf.

Then, the envelopes stuffed with cash became the enduring symbols of Westminster sleaze. Today the equivalent in the expenses furore would probably be what? The garden horse-manure? The rented porn movies? Or maybe the most delicious of all: the moat. (Well - we’ve all been there, haven’t we, with the blocked moat misery. Why does it always seem to happen at the weekends?)

MPs squirming under the spotlight now have all said they acted within the rules. Some have even insisted they acted within the spirit as well as the letter of them, however much it might look from the outside that they have been milking the system for all it’s worth.

Who do you think is at fault? The MPs or the rules?