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Constitutional Reform and Governance Bill

I do agree, but that is a consequence of the great boundary that we have developed between people in politics and people not in politics. I believe that the position will become worse if we follow the celebrity politics route, along with the assumption that being in politics means having to be a different kind of person from everyone else. The hon. Member for Cannock Chase mentioned the expenses crisis. I think that we need to mention it, but one of the aspects of it that strike me as dangerous is that, just as celebrities in show business are expected to have some kind of physical perfection, political leaders are now increasingly expected to have moral perfection, and that is simply impossible. We are not gods; we are only people. In both forms of celebrity, we have developed a form of airbrushing. Photographs of celebrities are airbrushed, and before freedom of information we airbrushed what we were doing here. Exposure of that has, I believe, been fundamentally damaging. The alternative approach is to reject the whole idea rather than going along with it, and to aim to tear down the barrier that I see developing between politics and people outside politics. That is a difficult route, however, because it is one that the media would automatically oppose.