Following the great parliamentary expenses scandal from afar has been to view my home country through the wrong end of a telescope: so many scuttling figures, comically diminished in scale, like poor, tiny Douglas Hogg, with his flat cap and backpack, breathlessly hurrying down the street pursued by a giant fuzzy insect in the form of a microphone. ‘That is not correct. That is not correct,’ he told the insect, like a pedantic character in Alice in Wonderland. ‘The schedule was not a claims schedule, it was a letter.’

It was disconcerting to see Britain turn into a one-newspaper nation. All the broadsheets waited on the Telegraph, whose early edition supplied them with their front-page stories. Columnists across the political spectrum took their tone from the Telegraph’s style of half-ribald, half-sanctimonious indignation. Some MPs even tried to out-Telegraph the Telegraph in their expressions of penitential shock at the excesses they were encouraged to indulge in by the House of Commons Fees Office.

Alice would have had a hard time grasping the idea that this was a constitutional crisis that threatened the collapse of parliamentary democracy, for it appeared to hinge on the modest semantic question of the difference between an allowance and an expense account, which could surely have been quickly resolved by recourse to the dictionary. The OED says that an allowance is ‘a definite portion, sum or amount, allotted or granted to meet any expenses or requirements’, while expenses are ‘the charges, costs, items of outlay, incurred by a person in the execution of any commission or duty; “money out of pocket”; also, money paid to a person in reimbursement of these.’

But the Additional Costs Allowance is partly flesh and partly fowl, a creature with hairy paws and feathers like the Gryphon. It is an allowance – £23,083 at the last count – but with the catch that you must account for it after spending it before you can claim it. The safest way of getting it is to dump sheaves of bills at the Fees Office to prove that you’ve spent far more than the amount of the allowance and are therefore entitled to it in its entirety. Given the thicket of ambiguous rules and regulations set out in The Green Book: A Guide to Members’ Allowances, it’s not surprising that most MPs seem to have followed the example of Margaret Beckett, who confessed: ‘I just grabbed together the relevant things and bunged them into the Fees Office and left it to them to sort it out.’