I’M looking forward to spending some of the August holiday in Yorkshire and Durham and this year I will also make a trip west to Coniston to visit the grave of one of my great heroes – the philosopher and historian RG Collingwood.

He wrote his most important books in the Thirties and died in 1943 aged only 53. His words are even more telling today than when he first wrote them. For instance, he says: “It is sometimes thought by people who have been reading historical thrillers that the Roman Empire died at the hands of barbarian invaders. This theory is amusing, but untrue.

It died of disease, not of violence, and this disease was a long-growing and deepseated conviction that its own way of life was not worth preserving. The same disease is notoriously endemic among ourselves.”

The shortest name for our disease is cynicism – and the most blatant example of this cynicism came last week when MPs on-themake published their “redacted” version of their expenses claims. This was an unbeatable outbreak of barefaced cheek.

After repenting for weeks on end of their financial fiddling and greed, they promised to reform themselves and make a clean breast of their misdeeds. But when it came to publishing their accounts, they blacked out mention of the most crucial items. In effect, they promised a confession, but handed us only a blank sheet of paper.

They made a scapegoat of the Speaker, Michael Martin, and forced his resignation.

Now, they are asking us to believe that the new Speaker will clean up Parliament and very soon everything will be whiter than white.

This will not happen, because any system is only as good as the people who operate it.

And our MPs – or at least a great many of them – have shown that they are a lousy, grasping, greedy bunch and not to be trusted.

So what is to be done?

I have a novel suggestion: sack the whole lot of them, close down Parliament, both Lords and Commons, and ask the Queen to rule us directly, assisted by the civil service.

Closing down Parliament would be no loss to democracy as it has not functioned democratically for years.

First, Tony Blair and then Gordon Brown made it their practice to bypass Parliament at every opportunity, with the result that effectively we are not governed by our elected representatives, but by a prime minister and his cliques and gangs of cronies and yes-men.

The decline of the reputation of Parliament is but the symptom of a wider decay. As the critic David Bentley Hart said last week: “We inhabit a culture of acquisitiveness, celebrity, therapy and monstrosity.” All the great institutions which were created over centuries to sustain a decent set of political liberties are at best dysfunctional and at worst downright rotten: education, health, the law – everywhere you look the vision is dismal.

Collingwood again: “What we are faced with is the threatened death of a civilisation.

Civilisations die and are born not with the waving of flags or the noise of machine guns in the streets, but in the dark, in a stillness, when no one is aware of it. It never gets into the papers. Long afterwards, we look back and notice that it was predicted by a very few individuals – who, of course, were ignored as crackpots.”

■ Peter Mullen is Rector of St Michael’s, Cornhill, in the City of London, and Chaplain to the Stock Exchange.