MR PENDLE: It was ‘business as usual’ after Twin Towers attack shock

IPSA guidelines say those under investigation should be named - but given the sensitivity that has surrounded MPs’ expenses in recent months, that surely cannot be right.

If the allegations are proved to be true, then yes, name and shame them.

They deserve all they get.

But to name someone who is alleged to have milked the system for thousands of pounds for second home trivia and who is then found to be completely innocent is wrong.

For there is another old saying that mud sticks - in other words, there will always be people who will believe an MP who is found innocent of expenses breaches has also been clever enough to pull the wool over the eyes of the investigators.

Mr March has said that, after much thought, the compliance role with the IPSA is not for him.

Perhaps the IPSA should reconsider its guidelines - it cannot be right for a person wrongly alleged to have swindled money from the public purse to be virtually hung out to dry and left to defend themselves against the nudge-nudge, wink-wink fraternity who will not believe they have nothing to hide.

“THE day the world changed”, trilled a television trailer for an American-made television documentary to mark the 10th anniversary of the attacks on the Twin Towers in New York.

Mr Pendle asks readers to note the words “American-made”.

For, as is usually the case, for the Americans, the world ends at the Pacific and Atlantic coasts. The rest of us are dismissed as incidentals.

The world may indeed have changed for the gung-ho, gun toting Americans, in that it gave them an excuse to spend millions of dollars tracking down Osama bin Laden.

The Americans, of course, are masters of this sort of thing.

They have the World Series at baseball, despite the fact very few other countries play the sport and none to the standard the Americans do.

And films on the Second World War inevitably portray the super-hero Americans as the ones who came to the rescue of the dim, incompetent Allies, although they turned up two years too late to take part.

Yes, the world may have changed for them - but for the rest of us, once we had got over the initial shock, it was very much business as usual.