The first sentence of a laudatory story in The Independent on Saturday offered the opinion of an unnamed Conservative MP that “David Laws is one of us”. Moments earlier I had just finished reading a report in the Daily Telegraph which revealed, among much else, that Mr Laws is actually what used to be called (probably still is by some) ‘one of them’, by which I mean gay.

The Telegraph has since been given a lot of stick from the likes of the ghastly Polly Toynbee for ‘outing’ him in this way. But I see no reason to doubt the newspaper’s assertion that it had no intention of alluding to Laws’s sexuality and that he had, in fact, outed himself. This is always assuming, of course, that he wasn’t already out. Some parliamentary colleagues say the nature of his relationship with James Lundie had been well understood for a long time.

Anyway, all this had nothing to do with the central issue of his claiming £40,000 from the public purse for Lundie’s property. That he knew he was in the wrong was evident in his immediate offer to repay the money. His ‘resignation’, if that is really what it was, is a further indication that he accepted his guilt.

Interestingly, he was continuing (for whatever reason) to deny his relationship with Lundie right up to the moment of the Telegraph’s Expenses Files exposée. He told Rachel Sylvester and Alice Thomson, who interviewed him for Saturday’s Times, that he was in no relationship. This article too, had a first sentence that looks interesting in retrospect: “David Laws says he does not know whether he is living in a dream or a nightmare . . .”

By then he knew it was the second.