So the Speaker Michael Martin has finally faced the inevitable and has resigned. Despite his resignation speech saying that he had decided to make this move, this is hard to believe. Whether he was given the final push by a certain individual over night (yesterday he made no mention of having an intent to resign) or whether the pressure had just got to much we don’t know. But the lack of faith from th Commons must have created quite an atmosphere that any MP could have cut with a metaphorical knife. The role of Speaker is not going to  be successful one if there are a significant number of people sitting in front of you who have lost faith in your ability.

The Speaker may have been able to salvage his position early last week when the expenses claims all started coming out in the Telegraph. Yes, he took a bit of  beating but he was no way near the front line of fire in terms of pointing the finger of blame. Everyone was too busy demanding answers form those who had “mistakenly” put in illegitimate claims for public money to pay for their overly lavish lifestyles. I suppose it would always have swung round to him at some point, but there is no denying Mr Martin definitely fuelled his own political suicide. One of his biggest mistakes was to miss the point of the whole expenses scandal completely. Instead of thinking up ways to reform the system or deal with those MP’s who had blatantly abused the system, he turned on those who wanted greater transparency and put all his efforts into trying to get the Police to find the whistle blower who leaked the information to the Telegraph in the first place. Mr Martin needed to remember and abide by the age old adage of not shooting the messenger.

The Telegraph is not the one to blame for all the furore, and any Police investigation should definitely not be focused on the journalists who wrote the story. It seems that any investigation is unlikely as the public interest defence is so overwhelmingly obvious that no court could seriously deny the information should not have been published. If it’s public money being spent on illegitimate claims, I can’t think of a much greater example of a story that is in the public interest.

The journalism seen in the Telegraph over the past 10 days or so has been the good quality, investigative journalism of the old days of journalism that we only see a tiny glimpse of every now and then these days in the media saturated, convergence style journalism that pours out of every medium. It is comforting to know the media are still working hard to keep those in power in line. Sales of the Telegraph have shot up since the revelations, which also brings a lot of reassurance to the newspaper world that there is still the need and the demand for the print press. Sometimes we just need to work that little bit harder and hope we can get the right story to put us back in the spotlight.