Treasury minister David Gauke, who clearly hasn’t suffered from a double-dip housing recession, made a £67,000 profit on his south London flat thanks to the kindness of taxpayers, but has only been asked to repay £26,762.

Will the lucre-grabbing legislators be sanctioned? This is one for the standards and privileges committee, aka the double-standards committee, so don’t hold your breath.

Lucrative dental practice
Its chairman, Kevin Barron, made a profit of almost £500,000 on the sale of his taxpayer-funded flat; and the vice chairman, Sir Paul Beresford, used public money to pay a mortgage and most of the running costs at his lucrative dental practice in Putney, which is located in his house. Neither has reimbursed taxpayers for the gains made from the pre-2010 mortgage payment scheme.

Perhaps Barron’s committee will now ask former parliamentary standards commissioner John Lyon why he never investigated the most blatant examples of MPs exploiting taxpayers’ generosity.

For example, perhaps it could look into the “petty cash” scandal, whereby MPs such as chancellor George Osborne, former deputy speaker Sir Alan Haselhurst and, er, Kevin Barron himself claimed £250 a month without having to show any receipts.

Live-in partner
Perhaps it will also explain why, despite forcing Labour MP Denis MacShane out of the Commons for the dodgy way he secured a £12,000 reimbursement for his work as Tony Blair’s envoy in Europe, Barron’s committee was so much more lenient with David Laws MP, who diverted £50,000 of taxpayers’ money to his live-in partner as “rent” but is now back in his ministerial car and attending cabinet.

Perhaps it will. But, then again, probably not.