By Christine Eade

As the MPs’ expenses scandal reaches the fifth of – only the Telegraph knows – how many weeks, I reflect on parliamentarians’ living arrangements when I began reporting Parliament 40 years ago.
They either lived like the haute bourgeoisie or like students.
In the last year of the Labour government, Cabinet ministers were intimidatingly grand, and seldom lived in their constituencies. 
I would never have dared ask Anthony Crosland why he didn’t live in Grimsby; Roy Jenkins why he didn’t live in Birmingham; Barbara Castle why she didn’t live in Blackburn or Jim Callaghan why he had no home in Cardiff.
They generally had second homes, but these were country cottages or, in Callaghan’s case, a farm in Sussex.
Jeremy Thorpe, the Liberal leader, used to joke about the grandee who said as an election was called: ‘I have got to go to my constituency.  And, damn it, at the next election, I’ll have to go again.’
Thorpe lived in his North Devon constituency. At the end of a day’s canvassing during the 1970 general election campaign, his wife, Caroline, invited me to their cottage. 
This was no John Lewis-list second home.  She proudly gave me the history of each elegant, polished antique.
The memory lingers sadly, because Caroline was killed in a car crash a few days later while driving back to London.
The new parliament included a record number of working class Ulstermen.  After their first day in Westminster they had nowhere to spend the night.
There is a rumour that they walked round Smith Square, Cawley Street and Lord North Street, knocking on doors, asking if anyone was renting out rooms.  Although these terraced houses were already the preserve of the fabulously wealthy, to the newcomers they were no different from a Belfast terrace where rooms were for rent.
That was what an MP did: rent a room. I was friendly with a Scottish journalist with a stolid mansion flat in West Hampstead where he rented a room to Dr Maurice Miller, a government whip, and Labour MP for Glasgow Kelvingrove.
The late Dr Miller was such a passionate Zionist that once, when we were feeling silly, we went into his room and hung up a Palestinian flag.
In retrospect, Dr Miller deserved better. 
On what point in the scale between student slumming and moated estate, should become clear in the next few months.