Twitter ye not

Is this the week we should feel sorry for MPs? Er, possibly not, although lots of them are feeling very sorry for themselves. You can see their point, even if you don't share it.

Sir Thomas Legg's retrospective rules on what was reasonable for MPs to claim for gardening and cleaning have understandably annoyed those who thought they led squeaky clean lives and had all their expenses agreed by the Commons authorities.

Even Gordon Brown's greatest enemies would struggle to argue that he went into politics for financial or even horticultural reasons but the Prime Minister now faces a bill of £12,415.10 for over-claiming on cleaning and gardening.

As you might expect, we started ringing round Welsh MPs yesterday to see if they had received their Legg letters - and what they said. Even hard-bitten hacks felt a bit sheepish ringing some of the more notable "saints" on the backbenches to ask whether they'd been accused of fiddling their expenses.

With all this focus on MPs' allowances, other stories may not have received the coverage they otherwise would have. But you can read here about David Blunkett's plan to donate his brain to dementia research (after he dies) and Chris Bryant's Twitter reshuffle.

Just as many politicians donate their papers to the Welsh Political Archive at the National Library, so I trust that the new Europe Minister's tweets will find a permanent if virtual home for future historians.

Planted questions

Another 41 Conservative MPs have signed cheques to repay expenses in David Cameron's latest exercise in transparency - or self-flagellation as some of the MPs might call it.

Among those to have reached for their chequebook, the Tory MP for Monmouth, David Davies, who can fairly claim to be a consistent questioner of the way our taxes are used.

He had the novel idea of setting up his own independent panel to vet his expenses. That panel queried two items - a council tax rebate and a claim for mortgage interest. The Tories' own independent scrutiny committee questioned a £12 invoice for a plant pot.

"I fully accept that these claims should not have been made and repaid them immiediately. To those who will inevitably suggest that I might have tried to do this to gain a financial benefit I think it only fair to point out that both the fees office and the independent panel have seen that I underclaimed on a number of items."

So David Davies will find himself £2,033.87 poorer and could be forgiven if he has second thoughts about setting up his own independent panel.

To add to his woes, he can't recall or trace the plant pot.

Community payback

The House of Commons has published a list of allowances repayments "voluntarily" submitted by MPs. You can read it here.

By my calculations, 14 of the 40 Welsh MPs have repaid some cash - and that doesn't include one or two who told their constituents they would pay back money but whose donations have yet to reach the public purse.

All the analysis you need

However many trees have been felled to bring you in-depth coverage of the expenses scandal, it's hard to beat the succinct analysis of ITN's political editor.

Tom Bradby's conclusion, as written in Total Politics magazine?

"A small minority of MPs has been completely and utterly taking the p***." [my asterisks]

It probably works better in print. Somehow I can't hear Tom saying it on air, before adding "and now back to you in the studio, Trevor".

Wrong place, wrong time

In journalism, as in the Manchester United penalty area, there's no substitute for being in the right place at the right time.

As the Commons Speaker fell on his sword for the first time in more than 300 years, I was more than 5,000 miles from Westminster, filming in South Africa.

I'd left these shores with the naive belief that the Chancellor was one person who would know how to fill in a tax return. Not for the first time this month, conventional assumptions have been challenged.

I returned to discover my taxes had been spent on duck islands, staff quarters, Farrow & Ball wallpaper, childcare for a Minister's staff and enough large screen TVs to keep several windfarms ticking over.

There was also a further shift in the political mood, with even those MPs who believed the media were setting themselves up as arbiters of morality now apologising for their role in a discredited system.

Julie Kirkbride is still hanging on as MP for Bromsgrove despite today's Telegraph headlines.

When politicians take to the airwaves to use "my little boy" as a justification for their use of public funds, you know they're in trouble. You wouldn't put your mortgage, taxpayer-funded or otherwise, on her survival hopes.

I returned in time to read Elfyn Llwyd's transparent explanation of his own expenses in yesterday's Daily Post.

Mr Llwyd stressed his frugality by telling the paper: "I live south of the river".

Those of us who find ourselves in the same geographically challenged situation look forward to the sympathy of MPs and perhaps the odd food parcel sent with a Meirionnydd postmark.

UPDATE: Julie Kirkbride has announced that she is standing down at the next election, as will the Labour MP Margaret Moran.