Shock, horror! MP exposed as a lying, cheating hypocrite!

So it turns out that, while promoting himself as a decent family man during the election campaign - devoted to his wife of 26 years and their children - the Lib Dem MP and EUphile, Chris Huhne was actually conducting a long term, clandestine affair with another woman.

As others have pointed out before, there was a time when such behaviour was deemed sufficiently bad that ministers were expected to resign. These days they cling on to their jobs pretty much regardless of what they get up to - which says a lot about the moral standards of our modern world and the current generation of politicians.

Perhaps the only real surprise here, though, is that anyone should be surprised that an MP should turn out to be a lying, cheating hypocrite.

That's partly the trouble - we've all become so used to our MPs being skilled in the art of deception that we're no longer surprised or even bothered by it. I've no doubt that Huhne's constituency party will rally around him and, by the time of the next election, it will have been sufficiently forgotten about for the electorate to vote him back in again.

But the reality is that all this stuff builds up over time. MPs wonder why the public no longer believe them or have and trust in them when they have repeatedly seen that these politicians have no loyalty to even those closest to them - so why are they amazed to find the public doesn't trust them either?

If they really want to restore public faith in politics - or rather politicians - then this would be a good place to start. Huhne should resign as a minister and stand down as an MP - if he doesn't then Cameron should sack him and his party should deselect him.

If they want us to trust them then they better start giving us reasons why we should - and one way of doing that is by not giving jobs to lying, cheating hypocrites.