MPs' pay

I know it's not fashionable but I don't think MPs are overpaid. In fact I think they are underpaid.

The best graduate trainees - 21 and never worked - get £45,000 these days. Maybe bonuses too. I remember my first job in a merchant bank: I could have got more training to be a traffic warden. But things are different now. To run the country we need to attract our best people - actually it would be better if they had worked for a few years before becoming MPs - so I think we need a salary of at least £100,000.

We must avoid attracting the mediocre, who see £65,ooo as a pretty good life. The alternative is to pay them nothing, which would mean they would have had to have done something lucrative first in order to afford it. But this would exclude too many good people who weren't money-focussed. So let's pay them properly.

If you pay peanuts you get monkeys. There's a fair few monkeys.........