Harlots and responsibility. Here we go again!

More allegations of  financial irregularities in M.P.' s expenses.
The onus is now very much on the press and The Daily Telegraph in particular (which on the whole is one of the best of the bunch) to explain to us, as they seem to be intent on discrediting each and every politician as they take office, in whose interest all these "revelations" actually are. They are certainly not in the interests of stable government or the management of a desperately ailing economy.
But nothing changes. Wasn't it Stanley Baldwin who said of the press of his day that it displayed "power without responsibility, the prerogative of the harlot down the ages."
I'm sorry if this offends our very British puritan sensibilities (although the 17th Century 'rule of the saints' during Cromwell's Commonwealth wasn't all that successful; it would be even less so today, given the absence of a common ethical narrative) but if we are waiting for our politicians to be whiter than white in all aspects of their lives (and we even seem to be demanding 'retrospective' probity now) we will have a very long wait indeed.
Now that the expenses system has finally been reformed and all the former "grey areas" and inconsistencies and downright idiocies (in which, we should remember, successive governments and the entire political class colluded - both for good and bad reasons) have been removed, it's time to draw a line and move on. Proper scrutiny is one thing, this kind of random destructiveness quite another. (Is it entirely random and disinterested? I can't be the only one to sense the settling of old scores in what is essentially a very incestuous relationship between journalism and politics.)