To be returning to Parliament from the Easter break just as three public disgraces or difficulties surface must be incredibly difficult for the large proportion of MPs who are reliable and hard working representatives of their local constituency. I have personally worked in settings where week after week the work you are engaged in is getting criticised by the papers. In the end you have to either get out or develop a thick skin, impervious to the news. However the constant secondary and tertiary comments from constituents and cynics can be a constant drain on the best and most resilient of people. You also struggle to know if the problems are real and something you must respond to, or just part of the dirt being swirled around by journalists who often have no idea what good practice looks like and in any event but cannot expect to get their stories published if they do write a good news story. Those that do develop really thick skins become really dangerous as they actually begin to perpetuate many of the worst practices of the institution either not caring or actually revelling in the mess made initially by a few renegades.

Yesterday three stories emerged, all of which leave Parliament and the 650 MPs and 800+ Lords further tainted, even though most of them have done nothing wrong:

First we had the appalling response from David Steel from a time when Cyril Smith had clearly been accused by several people of acting inappropriately with young boys. Historical Sex Abuse cases can never be expunged from the corporate history, and no institution, even ones as small as the Liberal Party will ever have a complete picture of what actually happened. This case was complicated due to the fact that Smith had been a Labour Councillor when some of the alleged abuses took place. It is surely better to acknowledge weaknesses in the institution and apologise for them, even if there was some justification for pointing at others, than to behave in a defensive manner. The way in which David Steel has accounted himself for the Smith case needs to be reviewed and the party needs to sound more like Tim Farron and less like David Steel on these matters. The same applies to the other parties, and all of the other institutions that carry similar amounts of baggage.

Then we had the response by Vince Cable to the sub committee. Minister Cable managed to claim that lessons could be taken from the sell off of Royal Mail, yet deny that any mistakes were actually made, nor that any acknowledgement was needed. In the real world of course things are complex and nuanced, but on those rare occasions when everything went fully to plan, there are still probably lessons that could be learnt. Even if Vince does not want to say we got it wrong, he could go quite a bit further to accept that the Government made some intensely difficult decisions, less well than they would have liked and he regrets that being the case. Surely the whole point of the UKIP surge is that we want Governments to sound more like real people and less like people with a Phd in Spin.

Finally the name of Patrick Mercer has emerged from months of silence and the nonsense of him continuing to be an Independent MP when everyone including himself knew he must have been guilty, because we had seen the evidence on our TV screens. There surely could have been no other outcome. Why on earth did he not admit his guilt and resign in July 2013 when the party was already coping with scandal from a number of other people. Now it has allowed all those wounds to be opened up again less than a month before a National election. There must also be a case for considering if this should be referred to the Police, other public servants acting in such a manner would surely face a great deal more than an enforced resignation?

The three examples are sadly entirely typical of the issues buried all over Westminster, capable of emerging whenever some history or some apparent policy failure is detected. For the sake of the many hard working and trustworthy MPs, could these other folk not work a bit harder at understanding how the suppression of these matters are damaging the very thing that they claim to believe in?