It’s been a hot news period. Aung San Suu Kyi’s release from house arrest and the freedom of Paul and Rachel Chandler from their kidnap ordeal in Somalia. So spare a thought for the future governance of the United Kingdom…or not.

The House of Commons has already effectively rubber stamped the Coalition Government’s plans to reduce the House of Commons by 50 seats, and to subject the electoral system to a referendum.

Tonight it’s the turn of the un-elected House of Lords to pass judgement on the views of the elected House of Commons as to how it should be elected and what it should actually be.

In theory, the House of Commons is supposed to hold the ‘Executive’ to account. But the Executive itself – the happy band of Ministers represents 20 per cent of the entire House of Commons.

In 1900 the Cabinet had 19 members. In 2010 it has 24. But Ministers outside the Cabinet have gone up vastly since 1900 – from 41 to 96 in 2010. What is particularly fascinating is that in the last 10 years, when Westminster is supposed to have devolved power to London, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, the number of Ministers at Westminster has gone UP by 20 Ministers! (And don’t begin to mention powers transferred to Brussels!)

So, if you push the number of MPs DOWN by 50 and the number of Ministers stays the same, or even goes on going UP, then the stranglehold the ‘payroll vote’ has on the Commons becomes ever stronger.

No wonder the un-elected are considering pursuing the elected with the prospect of referring the entire reform to a Lords Committee – ergo – no referendum for months, possibly years, to come.

Labour appears to have been discombobulated by the debate. ‘Just say no’, seems to have been the Party’s preferred option. What nobody seems keen to discuss is what sort of reform might actually improve Britain’s governance and the Government’s accountability.

How refreshing if a party would step forward with a coherent plan that would embrace a proper size for the Ministerial ranks, for the Commons, and a role for a reformed House of Lords itself.

Having lived and worked in the United States, I find it hard to imagine a viable Commons that needs to be larger than the 400 seat House of Representatives, nor a functioning House of Lords larger than the Senate’s 100 Senators. As for Ministers, who seriously believes that we need the present 119? What on Earth do they all do? Given devolution, and the need for much more to come – perish the thought – did the Victorians perhaps have it right at 60 Ministers in 1900?

As for the electoral system, and the size of individual Parliamentary constituencies? Please God, could I leave that to another blog?

There is something squalid about watching MPs screeching over the immediate decision to prosecute some of their number.

My sources suggest more MPs, and more particularly more peers, will be charged in the coming days and weeks. It’s clear this morning that some MPs are trying to find a way of extracting party advantage from the hysteria.

It will be confusing for many voters, that some politicians have behaved so badly that they require charging, that others have ‘paid back’ much larger sums of money and evaded any contact with the law.

One of the most mysterious aspects of the whole sage is the fact that in both the Lords and the Commons, extraordinarily wealthy people in their own right have felt it worth ‘fiddling’ their expenses to achieve such modest moneys in comparison to their vast worth.

Is this a facet of the human condition? That once you have it, you want still more?

The bits of judgement that seem to me to have been missed from Sir Christopher Kelly and Sir Tom Legg (the investigating authorities) are those that centre on the wholesale preparedness by all MPs to tolerate a system they knew was being abused (either by themselves or others); and the ‘culture of deference in parliament’.

If you go down to Westminster these days, MPs may not want to be seen much outside Parliament, but inside they still swan about the place as if it is theirs and not ours.

The current period of pain and revelation has done nothing to reduce the evidence that the culture, practice, environment, establishment of politics in Parliament require root and branch reform.

From the voting system to the all but unaccountable Executive, the need for reform is great; the chances that it will occur – all but nil.

I had to go down to the Commons yesterday to interview David Miliband. The Foreign Secretary was stranded in his office, held up by the election of the Speaker.

I am blessed with a Commons pass – largely so that I can evade the bolt cutters of the Metropolitan police and park my bike on the free-for-all racks under Big Ben.

I was armed with a room number and a vague location “behind the Speaker’s Chair”.

But finding the Foreign Secretary’s premises was no easy task.

The room number was followed by a letter – it turned out that the run of numbers of rooms at the Commons does not run in mathematical sequence.

My search for Mr Miliband took me down one corridor and up another.

I passed faces I knew but who gave no hint of recognition; and faces I didn’t know who seemed to know me.

It felt a dangerous escapade.

I expected arrest at any moment, uncertain of which corridor I could venture down and which I could not.

And that ever present danger that at any moment I might take a turn amongst the Pugin hangings that would land me not “behind the Speaker’s Chair”, but in front of it.

Spend half an hour down there, and I don’t recommend it, you come out feeling you have stepped into an Alice in Wonderland World.

My overwhelming and depressing sense is that it has no prospect of reforming itself, and thus very little prospect of it in turn reforming the British constitution – let alone writing one.

The most comforting moment? Re-entering the real world, to the policeman’s whistle on the gate and his call, “pedestrians, make way for the cyclist!”

I am at the apparent end of a tussle with the Financial Services Authority (FSA). Or I think I am. Last month it was revealed that 51 individuals had effectively failed to pass muster as “competent” to hold key positions in Britain’s financial services industry.

Or to put it more politely, these individuals had “withdrawn” from the application process after being independently assessed by the FSA.

On the one hand it was encouraging to find the FSA being so hands-on as to be pre-emptively fingering risky individuals who might blight the boards for banks and other financial services outfits.

But on the other, what is the point of barring such people from such sensitive work if we the people have no idea who they are? Where else might these people surface to threaten our corporate life?

The FT revealed that there were 51 individuals whose competence was challenged by the FSA. I wanted to find out who these people were and filed a request under the Freedom of Information Act. Within the statuary 30 days it was rejected. The FSA admitted they held the names but would not release them.

Then I asked for the jobs for which these people had applied and been rejected as unsuitable for by the FSA. Again the FSA refused. The FOI act is carefully drafted so as not to infringe the human rights of individuals with whom bodies like the FSA interact. There are no viable grounds for appeal.

So on a day when the political classes get to elect a new Speaker for the House of Commons – ultimately because freedom of information exposed the corrupt practices over which the former Speaker presided – we are not allowed to know the identities of the people who threaten the financial system through their lack of competence for such jobs.

My concern is whether the FSA has the competence to ensure that these people never occupy ANY position in ANY company that might threaten our own, or our own society’s welfare. Now, can the the FSA give us that guarantee?

On one level he is the fall guy of the expenses scandal. But on another, some see Michael Martin as the agent of his own undoing.

Look no further than the absurd scenes enacted yesterday as he processed through the Palace of Westminster. Did anyone ever think of cutting that frock coat so that some flunky didn’t have to trail along behind carrying it?

The truth is that what he wears and how he carries himself is very much in the hands of the Speaker himself. Why did Mr Martin feel the need to dress up with this lot? Why can a decent man not simply wear a suit and walk to his Speaker’s chair and get on with the job.

It would seem to suggest an acute lack of confidence that somebody behaving so normally could get away with doing the job. But in truth it seems that the “British way” is to have some vast mace carried ahead to see off attack, and to have a trail of officials strutting along in his wake.

Many of these are people who have seen service in war – one Black Rod saw action in the Iraq war. Why on earth do they have to be reduced to this?

Symbolically this will be the first test of the new Speaker. What will he or she do with this flummery? As Gary Gibbon has reported, Margaret Beckett is the hot favourite as Labour ranks show every sign of staying tribal and using their majority to vote for their own.

Ms Becket is no radical, but neither does she stand on ceremony. Hopefully, if she does win on Monday, she will have none of this pantomime, for that, if you watch the footage, is what we have.

Only a place that could sustain the flummery, class stratification, deference and absurdity exemplified by the Speaker’s procession could have come up with the expenses racket that has so seriously undermined it.

Incidentally, Westminster is so bashful about the absurdity enshrined in the Speaker’s procession that it is often impossible for us to film it. They refuse us permission, and we have to grab the shots on amateur cameras like tourists. Yesterday was an exception because Mr Martin himself wanted it filmed “for posterity”.

Gordon Brown will signal today whether the political classes “get it” when it comes to combating the expenses scandal in parliament.

“Getting it” extends well beyond expenses to full-blown reform of our system of governance, as I have written here before.

He is rumoured to want a change in the voting system – delicate in the light of the BNP’s benefit from the hopeless supposed PR system deployed for Euro elections.

However, there must be a fairer system than first past the post. The alternative vote plus voting system may be one.

But there are even deeper principles to be addressed. The direct election of the post Mr Brown holds. Term limits. My own MP is setting out on yet another run for parliament at the next election. Lovely, straight, dedicated guy. But after three decades?

So term limits? Eight years for a PM? 12 years for an MP? Reduction in size of legislature? Wholesale devolution of all domestic power to the local?

A new meeting place for our elected representative – Westminster wholly unfit for modern business? Separation of powers – no-one in the Commons, which is tasked with holding the executive to account and with vetting appointments TO the executive?

An executive drawn from beyond the Lords and Commons. A small, directly elected Lords to vet legislation in Europe, and a last “court of appeal” for local authorities?

The work on all this has been done many times over. Are the Lib Dems right? Should MPs and peers be kept at Westminster for all but a fortnight’s holiday this summer until they have sorted reform out? What on earth are they doing going off for more than three months hols? Who else amongst us enjoys such largesse at our expense?

Boris Johnson’s brush with a near-death accident on his bike in London’s Limehouse district (see video below) throws into sharp relief the experience we cyclists endure every working day.

I am, like Boris, a jobbing cyclist. I use the machine every working day of my life – to, from, and at work. Several times a week something happens that perhaps a second or two later, or a metre or so closer, might have killed me.

Mayor Johnson was with a team on bikes looking for suitable roads to carry new separated cycle lanes. A scrap lorry passed the group and, as it mounted a hump (sleeping policemen, designed to slow traffic), the back doors flew open, smashed into a parked car and dragged it along the street. The mayor and his team escaped unscathed.

What interests me is the reality that these near-death experiences for cyclists have actually reduced down the years. I used to have them every day – now, as I say, it is several times a week.

I was at a launch for MPs of CTC’s Safety in Numbers campaign in the House of Commons the other day. They produced statistics which show that cycling in London since 2000 has increased by 91 per cent and that fatalities have fallen by 33 per cent.

But facilities are still awful. Separated cycle lanes are rare and parking hoops, whilst more prevalent, are completely absent from Whitehall. I retain my Commons pass more for parking my bike than for attending any debate.

If you want to visit any ministry in Whitehall, there is nowhere to park a bike, and if you try, Cannon Row police either blow it up or smash the lock and cart it off to the cells (it has happened to me more than once).

The very fact that the seat of government remains so actively hostile to bikes (“We’re concerned about bicycle bombs, old chap”) speaks volumes about our real attitudes to green technology. What chance reversing climate change if you can’t park your bloody bike anywhere near the seat of the government charged with trying to fix it?

How about banning all private cars from the centres of all our major cities? There are absolutely no votes to be lost by doing so. It was Ken Livingstone, in introducing the congestion charge, who discovered that fewer than 15 per cent of people living in inner London ever bring their cars into central London.

In 10 years’ time we shall look back and wonder how we ever let them in in the first place as we breeze along our car-less boulevards on electric public transport, on streets configured to give bus, bike and walking human all the space they presently dream of.

I first set eyes on Gordon Brown at Edinburgh University in 1970.

We were both involved in student protests in our respective universities and I’d been invited from Liverpool University to give a talk to him and his fellow protesters on the campus in Edinburgh.

At around the same time Michael Martin, who had become an apprentice sheet metal worker at 15, was working as a committed trades union representative in Glasgow, fighting for better pay and conditions for his members.

What happened? How did these two men, transported into parliament by their high-profile left-wing political activities, end up presiding over what Gordon Brown yesterday called a “gentlemen’s club”?

Neither MP appears to have any record for criticising the place. What was it about the medieval practices in the Commons they joined that they found so irresistible?

And that goes for all the other student radicals and trades unionists who have washed through parliament in our lifetimes. They have all found a way of making it work for them and simply fitting in.

Sure, people have grumbled, but there has never been an act of wholesale defiance against the way the place operates. To a large extent, the lobby journalists down the years have allowed themselves to go along with it all. And still do.

After the defenestration of the Speaker, I awake to a new dawn, but with an overwhelming sense that not a lot will change. Is anyone likely to say boo if Speaker Martin drifts off to a well-plumped life in the Lords, to continue living, in part, at the taxpayer’s expense?

The fact is, we are not a nation of revolution. We like hierarchy. We wallow in tradition. The Houses of Parliament bask in both. For now, until they prove otherwise, they remain a “gentlemen’s club” – in that, Mr Brown is right.

And despite the pledge of new and independent administrative systems, the “now” is unlikely to end any time soon.

There has still been no explanation forthcoming as to why, amid all the other expenses details to have emerged from the Commons, only one named MP’s expenses seem to have been shredded.

It has been reported that other MPs’ expenses were also shredded. But I can only find the name of one MP to whom this has happened: Tony Blair. The missing expenses centre on a sum of £43,029 claimed over three years.

So we are forced to extrapolate from what we DO know of at least some of Mr Blair’s claims over the years. Surviving documentation reports refurbishment to his kitchen of £10,600.

A dishwasher was included at £515.75. This is an expensive machine. My Indesit cost £194.00 at John Lewis. But he could have had a Zanussi at £269.00. At £515.75 his Siemens dishwasher was significantly more expensive than the respected Bosch at £341 (all prices are current and taken from the John Lewis website).

As the dishwasher and the global sum for the kitchen are now, post shredding, all we have to go on, it indicates that, like other members of parliament, Mr Blair (who stood down as an MP in 2007) went for top of the range.

The question today is whether, like other MPs, Blair benefited at the expense of the taxpayer (property profits and tax relief – there is no tax liable on any of these “allowances”).

But in Mr Blair’s case the question is more serious. Why were his expenses details shredded? What kind of investigation, if any, is under way?

I am reliably informed that when new peers arrive in the House of Lords, there is a kind of informal induction process.

Baroness Helena Kennedy of The Shaws tells me that when she arrived in the house, a peer came up to her and almost immediately opened the question of “second homes”.

Lady Kennedy has a family home on Loch Lomond. The friendly peer suggested she tell the “authorities” that that was her “principal residence” – rather than the home she has lived in for 20 years, 20 minutes from Westminster.

“You then charge all travel and the rest as from the Scottish address,” added the peer helpfully.

And, of course, the overnight allowance is £174 per day, the attendance allowance £86 per day, and the secretarial allowance £75 per day. It all adds up, doesn’t it?

Additionally, although there is a list of Lords’ interests, at no point does a peer have to reveal what he or she earns from whom.

One of the under-explored aspects of government is the extent to which peers in the governing party can benefit in the Lords from their proximity to power. A peer on the governing benches can expect to earn very much more than an opposition peer.

It is no coincidence that a number of ex-ministers and senior Labour peers find themselves on the boards of major public companies. Because of their skills? Or is it because they can “use their influence on Minister” and charge for it? It’s probably legal, but is it ethical?

And should there not now be a freeze on further membership of the House of Lords until this entire debacle is resolved? David Cameron has spoken of reducing the House of Commons by 10 per cent. Others have talked of the need to reduce it by as much as a half.

If the “other place” is being reduced, what can the sense be of an ever-expanding House of Lords – the largest expansion of which comes after a general election (see previous blog)?