ONCE is unfortunate. Twice in two years is unforgivable.

In November 2004, Frank Cook, the Stockton North MP, had an expenses claim for £1,450 refused by the Commons authorities. He had moved into a new house in London and claimed the cost of gardening on formerly derelict land.

The “Gardengate” claim caused an outcry – even from within his local Labour Party – and Mr Cook blustered his way through. He said £1,450 was “not a hell of a lot of money” and asked: “Do my constituents want me to live in a garden surrounded by jungle?”

However, on his website’s “long biography”

(at 18,396 words, it is indeed long), Mr Cook admits that he was “insufficiently sensitive to public reaction”.

One might have thought, then, that Mr Cook would have been more sensitive about future claims.

Yet within two years, he made a claim for a fiver put into a church plate during a Battle of Britain service.

At first sight, it is almost possible to understand this. Because of their jobs, £64,766-a-year backbenchers are regularly at functions where they feel obliged to put £5 in a tin or buy a book of raffle tickets.

After a weekend back in their constituencies, they may be ten or more pounds out of pocket by helping good causes, and so may feel the need to ease such an enormous burden.

However, Mr Cook’s second case of expenses’ difficulty is not as simple as that.

Indeed, this time Mr Cook seems to have been extremely unlucky, a pattern of mis-chance allowing an IOU for a fiver to embark upon an unfortunate journey, “caught up in other bits of paper”, from a desk in Billingham to, of all places, the Fees Office in Westminster.

“I feel such a stupid tw*t,” said Mr Cook.

Indeed.

It is purely because of such distasteful claims that Britain now faces a debilitating crisis of confidence in its grandest Parliamentary institution, and Mr Cook – having felt public sensitivity for the first time – should hang his head in shame at his part in bringing it so low.